AFTER TRUMP — Since the start of JD Vance’s vice-presidential campaign this summer, I’ve heard versions of the same wistful complaint from his elite conservative allies: Where is the other side of JD Vance? Vance’s pugnacious side, they acknowledge, has been on full display — at his campaign rallies, in his combative television interviews and on social media, where he’s leaned into his habit of picking very public fights with his digital antagonists. But where, they wonder, is the side that has made him such an object of such hope and fascination among New Right intellectuals and National Conservative-minded policy wonks, the side that blends an unselfconscious nerdiness with an apparently earnest — if also somewhat naïve — longing to remake the GOP along nationalist and populist lines? At Tuesday’s debate, Vance gave these supporters a glimpse — if only a very fleeting one — of that side of him. Gone was the cat-lady-bashing, they’re-eating-the-pets MAGA firebrand. Here, at last, was the cerebral and wonky New Right figurehead that has won so many converts among the suit-and-tie-wearing conservative set. “This was the Vance that energized so many of us,” said Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative journalist and co-editor of the Vance-friendly Compact magazine. “Sophisticated, nimble, possessed of a post-neoliberal theory of bipartisan failure.” Vance’s debate performance will likely do little to change the dynamics of the presidential race — vice presidential debates rarely do, and snap polls show likely voters rated Tuesday’s debate as a tie. Nor will Vance’s comments during the debate — especially his refusal to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election — overcome Democrats’ suspicion that he is merely presenting a more palatable and polished version of Trump’s anti-democratic extremism. But after an undeniably rocky start to his campaign, Vance’s debate performance will go a long way toward reinforcing his reputation — which had been somewhat damaged by his early campaign foibles — as the standard-bearer of a new and ascendant brand of conservative populism. Consider Tuesday night’s debate the first stop on the JD Vance rehabilitation tour — or the first Republican primary debate of 2028. Either way, Vance came out ahead. “Anything can happen, of course, but I think the debate was his coming-out as the future of American conservatism,” said the conservative writer and longtime Vance supporter Rod Dreher. Vance’s pitch for this future was both stylistic and substantive. Stylistically, Vance came across as even-tempered and erudite — a stark contrast both to his running mate and to his own persona on the campaign trail. His debt to the so-called “reform conservatism” of the 2010s was evident in his attempt to put a more compassionate gloss on his right-leaning economic proposals, if not in the actual substance of those proposals. Substantively, Vance made his most robust pitch yet for a conservatism that moves beyond the so-called “dead conservative consensus” on trade, foreign policy, economics and the culture war. At the center of this pitch was his broadside against “the experts” who blessed the move toward globalization and economic liberalization that Vance believes is responsible for the decline of American manufacturing and the hollowing out of the middle class. This riff, more than any specific policy proposal, captured the crux of Vance’s political outlook: that America’s problems are the product of a feckless and corrupt elite — but that the solution to those problems is to replace those “the experts” with a better, and presumably more conservative, class of elites. It was revealing, however, that even the more substantive parts of Vance’s pitch didn’t contain much that’s new. Vance, contrary to the old Republican consensus, argued that the GOP should embrace an active role for government in propagating “pro-family” policies, but his outlines of those policies relied heavily on old-school conservative thinking about leveraging market mechanisms to lower the cost of childcare, among other things. On abortion, Vance frankly acknowledged that Republicans need to “do a much better job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue” — without acknowledging that his running mate is responsible for creating the post-Dobbs status quo that has undermined Americans’ trust in Republicans in the first place. It was symptomatic of a deeper contradiction in Vance’s pitch: his stated desire to break with the old Republican orthodoxy, but his unwillingness to break with Trump on the points where he plainly represented that old orthodoxy. In the end, his debate performance underscored the defining question of Vance’s career: Which side of him is in the driver’s seat — the MAGA firebrand or the New Right figurehead? Put another way, is his elaborate performance of conservative populism merely a means to get close to Trump, or is his effort to cozy up to Trump the first step in a longer-term strategy to transform the GOP into the party of national conservatism? The version of Vance that appeared at the debate was able to persuade his anxious allies that the latter is true — and, in the process, it bolstered his prospects of becoming Trump’s heir apparent in 2028, regardless of what happens in November. But it was, in the end, fleeting: By this afternoon, Vance had reverted to his typical campaign schtick of insulting Harris and teasing Walz at a rally in Michigan. Will the other version of him make another appearance? And will it be able to win any other voters to his side? We may have to wait four more years to find out. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at iward@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @ianwardreports.
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