(July 15)  From both political and governing standpoints, former President Donald Trump has made one of the worst choices imaginable in picking Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) to be his running mate.

Indeed, he has thrown the flailing Democrats a campaign lifeline, giving them a new, surefire way to scare undecided voters away from voting for Trump or to move from staying neutral to voting for President Joe Biden instead. Vance isn’t remotely suitable to be the proverbial heartbeat of the presidency.

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First, on purely political grounds, Vance is an odd choice. Vance has been in the Senate less than 18 months without remotely distinguishing himself with legislative accomplishments, and he proved a very weak vote-getter in his one and only political campaign. While he did win, he ran so far behind other statewide Republican candidates in Ohio that it was embarrassing. Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) won reelection by 25%. Attorney General Dave Yost and Secretary of State Frank La Rose both won by 20%. But Vance ran a gaffe-prone race and stumbled into office in his heavily Republican state by only 6%. He showed no ability to appeal to traditional suburban voters and little appeal to women.

Since being elected, Vance has been, well, a demagogue. Without ever offering a cogent explanation for his switch in tone and positions, Vance went from being a thoughtful contributor to conservative flagship National Review who wrote that blue-collar workers do not work harder than white-collar ones to one who now pretty much spews whatever MAGA, class-oriented nonsense he thinks will keep him in Trump’s good graces. Since 2021 he has been attached at the hip to Trump, despite in 2016 having written, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a**hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”…. [The full column is at this link.]