The never-Trump maybe-Vance voter

Plus: safety (not) first, eating your vegetables, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post.

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

The never-Trump maybe-Vance voter

(via Gage Skidmore)

I have a theory that there’s an under-reported group of voters in the 2024 election. Or perhaps not just under-reported but actually unreported—I don’t want to claim too much originality here, but I’ve seen no other coverage of the group I’m about to describe, and I think it’s possible that there are enough of them to be statistically significant in swing states.

I’m speaking, as my headline has already given away, of the never-Trump maybe-Vance voter. I’ve know several, and I don’t think they’re unique. Here’s how I’d sketch the category:

First, they do not like and have never voted for former President Donald Trump. They didn’t like him in 2016; they didn’t like him as president; they didn’t like him in 2020; and they still don’t like him in 2024.

They wouldn’t self-describe as “never-Trumpers” and don’t have (or at least have outgrown) the anti-Trump fixation that too online, formerly Republican never-Trumpers tend to have. They’re certainly not tweeting about “the former guy” (barf). But in terms of their voting records, policy preferences, ethical commitments, and gut instincts, they’re consistently opposed to Trump and have not shifted on that point.

But second, they kinda like veep nominee JD Vance. This isn’t a strictly political alignment. In some cases, they’ve liked Vance for a while, having read Hillbilly Elegy before he entered politics. On some issues, Vance’s politics may even be a negative. Trade and other economic policies are usually the biggest point of difference I’ve seen, as these voters don’t necessarily share Vance’s affection for protectionism, tariffs, minimum wage hikes, and the like.

They do tend to like the noninterventionist aspects of his foreign policy, but what they really like is his posture on children and families. Not the “childless cat ladies” snark (though that may elicit a chuckle) so much as the overall pronatalist vibe.

They like it that he understands the fertility crisis and is willing to call it a crisis. They like that he cares and knows enough to tweet about it personally. They like that he says it “should bother us” that Americans no longer have kids at replacement rate, and that we “want babies not just because they are economically useful. We want more babies because children are good.”

Are women human?

Maybe event more important, though, is that they identify with Vance. This is a big deal, because it’s the first time they’ve ever identified with someone on a major-party presidential ticket.

You see, in my observation, typical never-Trump maybe-Vance voters are married, churchgoing, white-collar, millennial men with kids. For their entire lives, presidential and vice presidential candidates have been people old enough to be their parents or grandparents. Vance is the first exception, the first peer to potentially hold this office.

We joke about the “beer question” in politics, but that kind of stuff does matter. In Vance, for the first time, these voters see someone with whom they could have a double IPA after church on Sunday. Someone with whom they could really talk theology. Someone with cultural and life-stage commonalities. Someone who, in different circumstances, could be a friend.

I don’t know if that’s enough to warrant a vote. I suspect many of these voters don’t yet know either. But I do think they’re thinking about it, weighing their affinity for Vance against their continued distaste for Trump, trying to guess whether a Vice President Vance is likely to have a remit of photoshoots and factory tours or if he could quietly run the show while a lame-duck Trump has another round of golf.

If they don’t vote for Vance (and, of necessity, Trump), I don’t see never-Trump maybe-Vance types voting for the Harris-Walz ticket instead. More likely, I expect, they’d vote third party, only on downballot questions, or not at all.

Are there enough of them for that decision to make a difference? I have no way of knowing, and I doubt there’ll be polling to decisively answer that question. But think about a state like Georgia (which Trump lost by fewer than 12,000 votes out of 5 million in 2020) or Pennsylvania (where the margin was about 80,000 out of nearly 7 million). I don’t imagine there are tens of thousands of never-Trump maybe-Vance voters in these states. But thousands? Yeah, could be. Enough to matter.

All that to say, I’m interested in exploring this theory further. Maybe I just happen to have met some oddballs, but I think it’s more than that. If you or someone you know could fit some or all of this description, reply via email or leave me a comment! If I can collect a bigger sample of these voters, I’d like to write about them in a larger venue.

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Intake

• Speaking of JD Vance, his big interview with Ross Douthat at The New York Times is worth a read.

• “No more Sundays on the couch,” by Erica Bryant Ramirez for Christianity Today

• “Administrivia,” by Alan Jacobs

• “Eat your vegetables like an adult,” by Yasmin Tayag for The Atlantic

• “U.S.-funded armies fight each other in Lebanon,” by Matthew Petti for Reason

• “How to find grace after disgrace,” by Peggy Noonan for The Wall Street Journal

• I’ve been in Washington for much of the past week attending the annual summit of

  Michael Wear
  ’s Center for Christianity in Public Life, where I just completed a fellowship that began in March. Both programs were good experiences, and you still have time to apply to next year’s fellowship if you’re interested! I’m happy to answer questions about it, too.

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Output

New work:

• What’s Israel’s endgame? | Defense Priorities (newsletter)

• Safety shouldn’t come first | Christianity Today

• JD Vance says Trump White House will ‘fight for Israel’ | Christianity Today

• The internet’s sins are our sins. But it shouldn’t escape all blame. | Christianity Today

Newly relevant work:

Once again speaking of Vance, I think the most I’ve previously written about him is this 2022 piece for

The UnPopulist

:

JD Vance, the Apostle of Appalachia, Embraces His Inner Troll

As is often the case with journalism, that headline was not my handiwork, and it’s not my favorite. It’s too final, and a key point of the piece was that Vance did not so much have an inner troll as he had external incentives to behave trollishly.

The article is certainly critical of Vance, who at that point competing in a seven-way GOP primary for his Ohio Senate seat and sounding ever wilder notes as he sought to stand out in a crowded field:

Over the course of nine months, he went from acknowledging that “at a basic level we already know mostly what happened” in the 2020 election—i.e. that President Biden fairly won—to alleging we “have a fake country right now” due to a “stolen” election. And, looking forward to 2024, he advised Trump in a podcast appearance to pull an Andrew Jackson and simply reject the constitutional structure of the federal government and ignore any unfavorable rulings from the Supreme Court that try to stop him.

Still, I was trying to strike a note of warning as much as critique, and I was interested in making a bigger, more universal point about character and habit, not trying to “take down” JD Vance:

Now, in [writer Rod] Dreher’s sketch of contrasting Republican candidates—the staid legislator who seeks concrete victories for ordinary voters vs. the trollish partisan rowdy—Dreher insists that Vance is still the former. Vance’s flirtation with red-meat politics to court MAGA voters is not mere political opportunism, Dreher insists; it is an effort to win elections to pursue a positive agenda on behalf of those Americans ignored by politics-as-usual. Vance’s politics aren’t mine—yet I hope Dreher’s theory is true.

But I fear that Vance has reached a point of no return: In politics, as in life, eventually how you act is how you are. Even if Dreher were right about Vance’s current intentions, the risk of Vance’s rowdy road to power is that it will come to be the only road he can take.

I’ve been critical of Vance again recently (about the “cat ladies” line and what it communicates about women), but I will say I think the question I raised in 2022—about whether the rowdy act is merely strategic or whether it has ceased to be an act at all—still feels like an open question.

And that’s a good thing! It’s a good thing insofar as Vance might well become vice president of these United States, and it’s a good thing for him personally, as someone whose profession of faith in Christ rings true to me.

This is entirely speculative, of course. I don’t know Vance personally. I don’t know what’s in his heart. But I do see him on the Trump ticket, paying obsequious lip service to a man I think he knows full well is unsuited for office and getting into the policy weeds on important issues and sharing prayers I believe he has actually prayed.

Now, I also think his whole political career—even before the veep nod—seems awfully like a Faustian bargain. I wouldn’t describe it anywhere near so favorably as Dreher did. But those signs of seriousness in his work and faith are good things, even if (or especially, C.S. Lewis would say) you think he’s on balance bad news for the country.

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