In the span of eight minutes, Vice President JD Vance ripped Democrats as needing an “ass-kicking,” stopped his speech to have the Nebraska crowd recite the Lord’s Prayer as a woman suffered a medical emergency and reemerged onstage after checking on her to chants of “48.”
Vance, by now accustomed to supportive audiences invoking the number as a reference to his presidential prospects, smiled, shook his head and motioned for the crowd to cut it out.
“Let’s take care of business in 2026 first,” Vance had replied to similar chants in Atlanta, a week earlier.
Tuesday’s election outcome — whether Republicans can defy grim predictions of major losses and hold the coalition Donald Trump assembled two years earlier — will set the tone for the political environment in which Vance may launch a 2028 presidential campaign.
Vance and people close to him insist he has not decided whether to run. But the 17 rallies he has headlined since Republicans’ midterm convention in September — and more in the months before that — have given him an opportunity to continue to define himself on the national stage.
He has had to do so, however, in the considerable shadow of Trump, a president who is deeply unpopular outside the Republican Party but remains dominant within it.
Vance has avoided criticizing Trump’s policies and has called attention to the administration’s accomplishments, but at times displays a difference in tone and style from the president. In public appearances this year, he has been more willing than Trump to acknowledge voters’ frustration over the war, the economy and even the administration’s handling of files related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
People around the vice president insist a bruising midterm would have little impact on Vance’s chances in 2028, particularly in a GOP primary. But his detractors in both parties are likely to cast any devastating GOP losses as evidence voters want to move on from the Trump-Vance administration.
“If we overperform, Trump deserves the credit, and at the same time, if we get killed, I don’t think any honest person would attempt to claim it was JD’s fault,” said one Vance ally, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss the thinking of the vice president’s camp.
Four people close to Vance described to The Washington Post how the recent flurry of onstage practice has been a useful exercise for the vice president, along with establishing goodwill with Republican officials he didn’t previously know.
Vance has been forced to think on his feet when confronted with hecklers — or even shouted at last week by supportive Montanans correcting his mispronunciation of Helena.
The poor political environment for Republicans has Vance spending more time campaigning for conservative, red-state candidates — people more likely to back him and repay the favor during a presidential primary than the moderate Republicans in traditional midterm battlegrounds. Vance devoting time to campaign for the potential next Republican governor of Florida, for example, is an upside of the GOP’s closer-than-expected races.
Regardless of the midterm results, the time Vance has spent over the better part of two years raising significant money for the Republican National Committee as its finance chair is also a net positive for him, his allies say.
A potential Vance 2028 launch is unlikely this year, even though Trump in 2022 announced his 2024 campaign a week after the midterms. Trump was out of office at the time, was the subject of investigations by the Biden administration and was desperate to revive his political relevance as soon as possible.
The president has publicly praised Vance but has repeatedly declined to endorse him, saying it is too early to do so. The Post previously reported that Trump privately told donors this summer that “we need to elect JD,” but he has not made similar remarks in public.
Vance this fall has continued, on rally stages and televised town hall forums, to serve as Trump’s more sympathetic messenger, a difference that people close to the vice president have described as a stylistic difference. If Trump is more interested in speaking to his base, Vance, at times, dabbles in the art of persuasion.
Where Trump has argued affordability is not a real concern for voters and insisted the U.S. is in an economic “Golden Age,” Vance has responded to voters that the administration still has more work to do to lower housing costs, gas prices and more, even as he touts other progress Trump has made. And as the president has described the war with Iran as a no-brainer to ensure Tehran won’t have a nuclear weapon — insisting Americans don’t mind the sacrifice of high gas prices as a result of the conflict — Vance, who described himself to The Post this year as a “skeptic of foreign military interventions,” continues to publicly acknowledge there are voters in the GOP and beyond who oppose the war.
He has also been deployed to places where Trump’s advisers have kept the president from going: Vance earlier this year went twice to Maine and once to Minnesota. He was set to return to Minnesota on Friday for an official event but canceled at the last minute because of a scheduling conflict, his office said. The vice president’s rally itinerary has been determined by the president’s political team and not by Vance’s staff, said several people with knowledge of the planning.
Vance’s handling of a rallygoer falling ill in Nebraska was similar to the playbook Trump has followed in the years of experiencing similar medical interruptions in the crowd — but revealed key differences.
When a woman seated behind Trump during a March rally in Kentucky became ill, the president stopped his speech and called for medical personnel to treat her. Trump eventually asked the sound technicians to turn on Luciano Pavarotti’s “Ave Maria” — the closest he came to leading the audience in prayer — though the song never played.
Vance, who is Roman Catholic, last month responded to the woman fainting in Nebraska by instructing his White House doctor to treat her. As time passed in silence, Vance made the sign of the cross and urged the crowd “to pray as the Lord taught us to pray.”
“Our father, who art in heaven,” he began. Vance recited it all with the crowd, lowering his voice for one line.
“Forgive us our trespasses,” Vance whispered.
Vance has made his Catholic identity a key part of his political brand, publishing a book this year on his conversion. Trump, notably, has not placed an emphasis on his personal faith.
Instead of waiting by the lectern as Trump had, after the prayer, Vance left the stage, jumped down from the catwalk and climbed into a seating area, walking into the crowd to find the woman.
“You don’t have to apologize,” he said, grinning over her. “I’m going to tell all them you just wanted the attention.”
The local newspaper wrote up the event with a photo of Vance smiling next to the woman, who at that point was wearing an oxygen tube.
Earlier in his Nebraska speech, Vance, as he often does, invoked both his young family and his lifelong bad habit of cursing as he explained a house rule his 6-year-old son had imposed: “Daddy’s not allowed to say the f-word.”
Minutes later, he was praying.
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