J.D. Vance Is About as Flat as a Day-Old Diet Mountain Dew

When Donald Trump selected J.D. Vance as his running mate last week, the Republican convention crowd seemed ecstatic. But now—outside the MAGA bubble, and after a seismic shift in the presidential race—the luster has worn off the Ohio senator. “He was the worst choice of all the options,” as one House Republican put it to the Hill. “It was so bad I didn’t even think it was possible.”

“The prevailing sentiment is that if Trump loses,” another added, it is “because of this pick.”

Trump’s veep shortlist had been stocked with shameless sycophants who pledged themselves not just to an extreme MAGA agenda, but to the former president personally. Vance—the preferred pick of Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.—was regarded as the least likely to expand Trump’s existing base. That may not have seemed like much of an issue a week ago, when Trump appeared on track to rout a senescent Joe Biden in a 2020 rematch. But then Biden dropped out, Vice President Kamala Harris quickly began closing the polling gap with Trump, and what was previously shaping up to be a Trump cakewalk has become a competitive hundred-day sprint to Election Day.

Where another Republican—say, Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, or even Nikki Haley—may have been an asset on the trail, Vance has so far seemed a drag on Trump’s ticket. He is, as CNN’s Harry Enten noted, the least popular vice presidential nominee in decades, according to polls, which also find his favorability ratings low with undecided voters and even those in his own home region. His recently-resurfaced remarks about what he calls the “childless cat ladies” in the Democratic Party—including Harris, who has step-children—have been roundly criticized for their extraordinary cruelty. And then there is what we might describe as his anti-charisma, as displayed by his flat jokes about Diet Mountain Dew and a recent “behind-the-scenes” peek at a campaign event he gave supporters in a fundraising video.

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“They’ve got a ton of crap for you to drink and eat,” he says in the video, showing off a table of Snickers bars and none other than Diet Mountain Dew. “This is the energy that powers the presidential and vice presidential campaign.”

“Energy” is maybe a strong word for Vance, who embodies all of the Trump movement’s extremism but lacks the Vaudevillian showmanship of Trump himself. Now, with Harris in the race, “the road got a lot harder,” as one House Republican put it to Axios. Vance “was the only pick that wasn’t the safe pick,” the representative continued. “And I think everyone has now realized that.”