Since joining the Republican presidential ticket in July, Senator JD Vance has projected unrelenting confidence that he and Donald J. Trump will win the White House. But in the final days of the race, he acknowledged that they had not spoken much about what kind of role he might play after an election victory.
“Trump and I both are so superstitious that we don’t like to talk a lot about what it’s going to look like afterward,” Mr. Vance said in an interview Saturday night on his campaign plane. “I really just see my job as an extra set of hands for the president.”
But Mr. Vance said that he would like to be an influential voice on immigration, manufacturing and tech policy if the Republican ticket wins the race for the White House.
Mr. Vance, 40, was seated next to his wife, Usha, and across the aisle from Donald Trump Jr., who had joined him on the trail. Mr. Vance, an Ohio Republican, spoke about how anxious he would feel come Tuesday morning, what he would do if Mr. Trump, 78, showed signs of decline and what he has learned over 16 tumultuous weeks on the trail.
He appeared calm in the final days of the close, tense race, having changed into a T-shirt and jeans from the dark suit and tie he had worn to his campaign events and cracking open a can of Coors Light as the interview ended. And he projected good cheer, joking about his impact on the “pet owner vote” during the campaign. (After joining the ticket, Mr. Vance was roasted for his past criticisms of “childless cat ladies,” and he spread false rumors that Haitian migrants in Ohio had been eating pets.)
And Mr. Vance looked ahead a little at what a second Trump administration might look like, saying that he thought Mr. Trump’s ironclad grip on the Republican Party made it unlikely he would face the same kind of struggles with Congress that he had during his first term.
“I would be surprised if you have Congress and the president at loggerheads like you did in 2017 and 2018,” Mr. Vance said. “There is broad recognition that this is the leader of the party, and there’s going to be, I think, much more unity when it comes to public policy.”
Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016 surprised many Republicans, including on his own campaign, and his combative political style was ill-equipped to persuade conservatives in Congress who harbored opposing policy views. Eight years later, Mr. Trump has remade the party, squelching resistance and prioritizing loyalty.
His overhaul has been so sweeping that if Mr. Trump and his allies were to succeed in the election, it could well mean replacing checks and balances in Washington with Mr. Trump’s wishes and whims. The Trump-Vance campaign platform, a list of 20 items written in all caps and with little detail, is aimed largely at anti-immigration goals, including “the largest deportation operation in American history,” and staking out ground in culture-war issues over race and gender.
Mr. Trump’s immediate priorities in a potential second term would include executive orders on immigration and border security, streamlining energy regulation and “a strong effort to get things settled in Ukraine and Russia,” said Mr. Vance, who has been a vocal opponent of U.S. aid to Ukraine.
In his 114 days as Mr. Trump’s running mate, from the announcement on July 15 until polls close on Tuesday, Mr. Vance will have participated in 83 public campaign events. Pennsylvania, the biggest electoral prize among battleground states, was his top destination with 17 events, followed by 14 in Michigan, 13 in North Carolina, 10 in Wisconsin and 10 in Arizona.
He hosted 44 campaign fund-raisers and participated in 149 interviews with newspapers, magazines, podcasts, radio stations and local and national television programs, according to the campaign’s tracking.
Just two years removed from his first campaign for public office, Mr. Vance has been front and center for many of the unexpected twists — and driven some of the central story lines himself — that have come to define the 2024 presidential contest.
He faced an avalanche of criticism after joining Mr. Trump’s ticket over his past attacks on “childless cat ladies” holding positions of power. He also saw his past criticisms of Mr. Trump excavated and trumpeted, like his 2016 comparisons to “cultural heroin” and to Hitler. The assault from Democrats took a toll on public opinion of Mr. Vance, and he quickly became one of the most disliked vice-presidential candidates in recent history.
But in hindsight, Mr. Vance said, those early attacks may have been something of a blessing. A plurality of Americans still dislike him, but while that rate has plateaued in the past two months, the share of voters who like him has steadily increased, according to a FiveThirtyEight average of national polls.
“I’ve always felt that one of my gifts is that I tend to do pretty well in high-pressure situations,” Mr. Vance said. “So I think that it definitely sharpened me and made me a little more willing to go and be as aggressive as I needed to be.”
His initial campaign appearances were often angry and scolding — he once responded to a question from a local news reporter in Detroit about what made him smile by listing a series of things that bothered him — but he said he has enjoyed campaigning more after understanding that he could have fun on the trail while also keeping his eye trained on continuous criticisms of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Still, Mr. Vance predicted that his anxiety and impatience would quickly emerge after his final event of the campaign, a rally on Monday night in Newtown, Pa.
“On Tuesday morning, I will be as miserable as a person can possibly be while being healthy and having a healthy family,” Mr. Vance said. “I hate not knowing. I hate it. And the closer you get to the finish line, the more I’ll have that sense of, ‘I just want to know.’”
Mr. Vance said he and Mr. Trump did not directly discuss the possibility of joining forces on the Republican ticket until July 13, two days before he was announced as the official choice.
After an initial conversation that morning at a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump traveled to a rally in Butler, Pa., where he was shot in the ear by a would-be assassin. Mr. Vance, who was at a family event in Ohio at the time, said he drove home after hearing the news and started loading his guns, unsure what might unfold.
In Mr. Vance’s first week as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, President Biden dropped his Democratic bid for re-election, a move that jolted the race for both parties. As the headlines over “childless cat ladies” started to fade in August, he ignited another firestorm in September by promoting false claims that Haitian migrants were stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.
But for Mr. Vance, one of the most surprising elements has been how the presidential contest has seemed to remain virtually unchanged despite these seismic events. After a bump in polling for Ms. Harris after she replaced Mr. Biden as the Democratic nominee, Mr. Vance said internal campaign polling had consistently shown tossup races in most battleground states.
“It’s remarkable how immune the electorate was to things that, allegedly, were very big stories,” Mr. Vance said.
Mr. Vance has constantly accused Ms. Harris of lying to Americans by covering up what he described as deteriorating health for Mr. Biden. But the Republicans’ ticket has its own age issue to worry about: Mr. Trump, 78, is already older than Mr. Biden was when he assumed the presidency in 2021.
Mr. Vance said he had not thought about how he would handle a potential decline in Mr. Trump if the two men were elected.
“I talk to him every day — he clearly is a guy who has the ability to do the job,” Mr. Vance said. “And if, God forbid, that changed, you deal with it when it changes. But there are a lot of other far more likely and, frankly, far worse things that come up over the next four years. I try not to worry about too many hypotheticals.”
Mr. Vance said he had talked with Mr. Trump a few times a month before being tapped as his running mate. Now, they talk several times a day.
“The first couple of weeks, when things were just so crazy, he was constantly calling to check in and say, ‘Hey, you’re doing great,’ and give me a little pep talk,” Mr. Vance said. “Now, obviously, it’s a little bit more focused on ‘What are we seeing?’ and ‘What are we hearing?’”
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