In This Episode
It’s been about a month since former President Donald Trump chose J.D. Vance to be his running mate on the Republican ticket. And in that short amount of time, the Ohio senator has made history… as one of the most unpopular picks for the job ever. The latest polls show more than 40 percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Vance, prompting some to question whether he could sink Republicans’ hopes of winning the White House in November. To better understand the extent to which Vance has become an albatross for the Trump campaign, Max and Erin look at four other unpopular V.P. picks in modern history, from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin all the way back to former President Richard Nixon’s turn as President Eisenhower’s running mate in the 50s. They’ll explore the effects each candidate had on his or her respective ticket, and what it could all mean for Vance and the Republicans this year.
TRANSCRIPT
Erin Ryan: So, Max, when I think of the great duos, I think of, you know, Batman and Robin, Simon and Garfunkel, Kirk and Spock.
Max Fisher: Bert and Ernie.
Erin Ryan: Bert and Ernie, two complementary figures who uplift one another’s strengths and compensate for each other’s weaknesses.
Max Fisher: I take issue with the idea that Ernie has weaknesses, Erin. But continue.
Erin Ryan: Well, there’s a duo in the news right now whose two halves are not adding up to a greater whole, although they are adding up to a kind of hole. [laughter] Donald Trump and his recently selected running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance.
Max Fisher: Oh, yeah, Vance has, I believe, the lowest favorability rating of any VP candidate ever at this point in the race. Only one in three look at him favorably.
Erin Ryan: Yeah. Vance, it turns out, is a cornucopia of unpleasantness, from his sinister stare to creepy comments about childless cat ladies and agreeing with a podcaster who said that postmenopausal females only purpose is to take care of grandchildren. The rollout has not gone well. To give you a sense of the reception a month in, here’s a recent clip from the podcast Today in Ohio put out by the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
[clip of Today in Ohio host 1] The question I come away after all of this discussion about J.D. Vance over the last month is, did the Trump people do any vetting?
[clip of Today in Ohio host 2] Right. I had the same thought.
[clip of Today in Ohio host 1] It’s like, how do you not find all of the wacky stuff he said and this kind of exposure.
Erin Ryan: Ohio is J.D. Vance’s home state. When you lose the home team, you are in trouble.
Max Fisher: It’s not going well, it’s not going well. And the discussion isn’t even can the campaign make people like Vance? Its has this gotten so bad that the drama of firing him from the ticket would actually be preferable to keeping him on?
Erin Ryan: Less Simon and Garfunkel than Liam and Noel Gallagher.
Max Fisher: Okay, one for the Gen Xers.
Erin Ryan: Yeah. Gen X, what’s up? [laughter] [music break] I’m Erin Ryan.
Max Fisher: And I’m Max Fisher.
Erin Ryan: And this is How We Got Here, a series where we explore a big question behind the week’s headlines and tell a story that answers that question.
Max Fisher: Erin, welcome back.
Erin Ryan: Thank you, Max. Our question this week is JD Vance such a disaster that he could actually sink the Republican ticket in November?
Max Fisher: Obviously, it’s hard to isolate the Vance effect specifically, Trump is down in the polls for a lot of reasons right now. For one, he’s barely campaigning since the failed assassination attempt. For another, his opponent, Joe Biden, dropped out of the race, of course, replaced by the far more popular Kamala Harris.
Erin Ryan: Still, like you said, Vance is deeply unpopular. And he’s weird. He constantly says and does weird, offputting things.
Max Fisher: Our story this week is about four other times in which a vice presidential nominee became a liability for the ticket, what effect it ultimately had on the campaign, and what that tells us about the likely political impact of the Vance debacle.
Erin Ryan: Our first story about a ticket sinking Veep candidate is also by far the most notorious. Thomas Eagleton, who was the Democratic vice presidential nominee back in 1972.
Max Fisher: Ah yes, the dreaded Eagleton affair.
Erin Ryan: Never good when your name becomes an official affair.
Max Fisher: And still to this day, every time there’s an unpopular vice presidential nominee, you see headlines about Eagleton fiasco haunts campaign, or whispers of Eagleton as ticket struggles in polls.
Erin Ryan: Max, tell us the story of Eagleton, which does sound like a made up name of a vice presidential candidate in America, but was a real guy.
Max Fisher: Well, I’m sure George McGovern wishes that it was a made up name, so okay, 1972, George McGovern is the Democratic nominee. And it was a very hard fought, hard won primary, which means that he is at the DNC when he is trying to pick his vice presidential candidate. So he’s up to the wire and he keeps going to people and getting told no. Like Ted Kennedy is his first choice, Ted Kennedy says no. Which, by the way, is not a good sign for your campaign.
Erin Ryan: Yeah.
Max Fisher: If nobody wants to be vice president.
Erin Ryan: Yikes.
Max Fisher: It gives you a sense of where we’re going here.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, Kennedy is like, no, thank you.
Max Fisher: Yeah. Doesn’t want to touch this with a ten foot pole. So McGovern eventually ends up with his, like, fourth choice, which is a popular young Missouri senator named Thomas Eagleton. And because this is all happening very quickly, because they have to get him on the ticket right away. And also just because, like back in this era, they didn’t really do vetting the same way they do now. They didn’t do all the like the forums and the interviews and the background checks. It was just like a chat.
Erin Ryan: Right.
Max Fisher: Between George McGovern and Thomas Eagleton. And you didn’t ask any uncomfortable questions because it’s two gentlemen.
Erin Ryan: Right. Instead of the internet, they had like a series of hamsters and uh quill.
Max Fisher: Honestly bring back the hamsters and quill. I’m ready for it. Um. So. Okay, Eagleton signs onto the ticket, and very quickly, like, within a couple of days, it starts to come out that Eagleton had this thing in his past in the ’60s where on three different occasions, he had been hospitalized for depression and received electroshock therapy.
Erin Ryan: Oh.
Max Fisher: And this. Yeah, I know it’s a serious issue. And it becomes a, like, very big issue on the campaign trail. It’s coming up all the time. And people who were involved in this will swear up and down that the concern was never is he mentally or emotionally fit to be vice president, but rather that it was this quote unquote, “finger on the button issue that it’s like it’s the Cold War. Is he going to be able to go through with a high stakes standoff with the Soviets? And like, I don’t know if I believe that. Maybe it’s a distinction without a difference. But anyway, finger on the button is the big, it’s like dominating coverage of the campaign.
Erin Ryan: We want somebody with untreated depression [laughter] to be managing our nuclear arsenal.
Max Fisher: You know, Ronald Reagan was in eight years later.
Erin Ryan: Oh. Okay okay.
Max Fisher: So it’s we’re jumping ahead, um actually it did it did go to Richard Nixon, who absolutely, 100% had untreated depression.
Erin Ryan: Okay. And that turned out great.
Max Fisher: Which worked out great. So in any event, national newspapers are calling for Eagleton to drop off the ticket. Big Democrats are calling for him to drop off the ticket. It’s become a huge issue. There’s this issue that comes up within the campaign where, like George McGovern’s people want access to Eagleton’s doctors to interview them, and they can’t get it, and they want his medical records and they can’t get it. It’s very messy. And then finally, because of the, like, drop in the polls, public calls for Eagleton to drop out, personal friction between them. On day 18 of Eagleton joining the ticket, George McGovern asks him to drop off and he does.
Erin Ryan: Oh my goodness. So we’ve got a clip of Eagleton speaking to CBS news the day after he resigned from the Democratic ticket.
[clip of Thomas Eagleton] I thought it would fade away during this month of all this, you know, I go to [?] city so that the very sheriff [?] would get tired of asking me in every city of the country about my health and that it would run its course. But an argument can be made that it would linger on. So I’m not here to say who’s categorically right or who’s categorically wrong. I’ll just say that George McGovern could not have been finer to me. I believe in him as much as I did in Miami, and I’m going to work for him, maybe work for him doubly hard.
Erin Ryan: Oh my gosh, that you can hear the sadness in his voice.
Max Fisher: I know America is a mean fucking country sometimes.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, especially to men with mental health concerns that they try to get addressed.
Max Fisher: Right. I mean God forbid.
Erin Ryan: With the with yeah. With the technology of the day. George McGovern and his replacement VP candidate Sargent Shriver, his real name on his birth certificate, Sargent Shriver went on to a historic loss against Richard Nixon, winning only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
Max Fisher: The biggest blowout in any U.S. presidential election ever.
Erin Ryan: Oof. We should say McGovern was probably never going to win. Before Eagleton even came on to the ticket, polls had Nixon with a ten to twenty point lead for months. People were so weird back then.
Max Fisher: I know I know [?].
Erin Ryan: How can you prefer Nixon to anyone?
Max Fisher: I boy, did they.
Erin Ryan: I would rather vote like his wife was much more appealing than he was. Anyway.
Max Fisher: Yeah. I like that.
Erin Ryan: That was you know what we we look back on the past with rose colored glasses, but people were out of their mind.
Max Fisher: America has always been America.
Erin Ryan: Yes.
Max Fisher: For better or worse.
Erin Ryan: Oh my gosh. But after Eagleton, Nixon’s lead jumped to 30 points and then gradually fell. He won with a 23 point lead. Honestly, if I were somebody who was going to vote for Nixon and I saw he was up 30, I would be like, you know what? I’m going to the beach on election day. It’ll be fine.
Max Fisher: Well, you were not alone, it turns out.
Erin Ryan: Yes.
Max Fisher: A lot of people felt that way, so okay, Erin, what do you think? What does [?] Eagleton tell us about the pickle of a ticket that Trump and Vance find themselves in now?
Erin Ryan: I think it tells us a lot about the way that people were terrible back then.
Max Fisher: Sure.
Erin Ryan: Back in the day.
Max Fisher: Yeah.
Erin Ryan: But I think it tells us that the only way to justify removing somebody from the ticket after the convention is if something earth shattering comes out. And we’ve been kind of hearing–
Max Fisher: That’s true.
Erin Ryan: –this like drip, drip, drip of weird stuff that seems like generated by [?] researchers about Vance, but none of it is Earth shatteringly bad.
Max Fisher: It’s not a casus belli to pull them off the ticket. That would give everyone who might want to do that already the face saving excuse to be like–
Erin Ryan: Right.
Max Fisher: Well, we had to do it because it came out that he said this.
Erin Ryan: Right. Like if it revealed that Vance is actually three Peter Thiels in a trench coat, then they might have to figure figure out how to replace him. But I think that this tells us that something seismic needs to happen in order for a seismic change, like a replacement of a running mate to happen. Now okay, let’s move on to the second big instance of a vice presidential candidate arguably not for sure, but arguably hurting the ticket. Here’s the fateful moment from 2008, when senator and Republican presidential nominee John McCain took aim at the glass ceiling and then flinged a great Alaskan moose at it.
[clip of John McCain] To help me fight the same old Washington politics of me first and country second. My friends and fellow Americans, I am very pleased and very privileged to introduce to you the next Vice President of the United States. [crowd cheers]
[clip of Sarah Palin] Some of life’s greatest opportunities come unexpectedly, and this is certainly the case today.
Erin Ryan: Oh my gosh.
Max Fisher: Remember that?
Erin Ryan: I remember that very, very well.
Max Fisher: I remember the exact moment.
Erin Ryan: It was a Hail Mary from the McCain campaign.
Max Fisher: Yeah.
Erin Ryan: And for a while people were like excited about her. And I remember people having bad dreams about her. Um. She really triggered the libs.
Max Fisher: She did.
Erin Ryan: I’ll say that.
Max Fisher: You truly cannot overstate how fully Democrats freaked out over Sarah Palin’s nomination like up until this point, Obama had generally had a slight lead in the polls. But now here’s this young new governor on the Republican ticket. She’s energetic, she’s folksy.
Erin Ryan: She’s pretty.
Max Fisher: Sure. [stammering] It just is like she’s bringing this new energy that had not been there before. And within a few days, McCain pulled ahead in the polls for the first time in the race.
Erin Ryan: But then, as voters got to know Palin better, and as Palin became more erratic on the campaign trail, she went from an asset to a liability. To talk about what happened, I spoke with my co-host on Hysteria, Alyssa Mastromonaco. Alyssa, among her many other jobs in Democratic politics, vetted potential running mates for John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008. When I asked her about past vice presidents that have hurt the ticket, Palin was the first person she named. Here’s Alyssa.
[clip of Alyssa Mastromonaco] At the beginning, when McCain picked her, we were scared to death. Nobody knew that much about her. She came out. She had a dynamic young family. She was getting huge crowds, which is something that we had sort of cornered the market on. And then famously, she did the interview with Katie Couric where it became clear that she was not ready for prime time. She couldn’t really talk about foreign policy in any meaningful way. She couldn’t even list newspapers that she read daily. And I think after that, it was the um race to try to tidy her up enough to make it through the election. But I think that she is one person, one VP pick, that people were like, record scratch. Nope no no no no.
Max Fisher: We should actually play that Katie Couric clip that Alyssa mentioned because it drives home how much of a disaster Palin became in the campaign.
[clip of Katie Couric] When it comes to establishing your worldview, I was curious what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?
[clip of Sarah Palin] I read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.
[clip of Katie Couric] But like what ones specifically? I’m curious that you–
[clip of Sarah Palin] Um. All of them, any of them that um have been in front of me over all these years. Um. I have–
[clip of Katie Couric] Can you name a few?
[clip of Sarah Palin] I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news.
Max Fisher: I miss her, I’ll be honest.
Erin Ryan: I miss her too. You know, honestly, that would be one of Donald Trump’s more coherent responses.
Max Fisher: That’s true.
Erin Ryan: To a question.
Max Fisher: That is a great point.
Erin Ryan: If he had answered exactly with the words that she. I think, you know, Sarah Palin flew in a uh plane shooting wolves so that Donald Trump could fly on a bigger plane. Um. So what lessons from the Palin debacle can we learn for today?
Max Fisher: I I don’t know how you feel about this, but I kind of think this is actually pretty analogous to what’s happening with Trump and Vance right now, minus the bump that Palin initially brought. But the like latter half of Palin and McCain, she became more and more of a liability. She was sucking up more and more of the oxygen because so much of the day to day coverage was about like various scandals from Palin’s past as governor and like wild things that she was saying on the campaign trail that were freaking people out. And she like, yes, had this fan base, but she was just alienating more and more people. And that became what the campaign was about, was about like Sarah Palin’s baggage and bullshit. And then it also led to a big split within the campaign. Where like the last month or two, McCain and Palin were essentially running two different campaigns that hated each other and that were just openly sniping at each other. And I’m really crossing my fingers. It feels like that’s where we’re going with Trump and Vance.
Erin Ryan: It really does feel like that. But, you know, I was thinking about Eagleton in the context of Palin and how health became something that people were kind of grossly prodding into.
Max Fisher: Sure.
Erin Ryan: And I remember in 2008, look, Sarah Palin does not need to be defended in any way, shape or form.
Max Fisher: However.
Erin Ryan: I am I am pointing out that there was sexism in some of the ways.
Max Fisher: Of course.
Erin Ryan: That we talked about–
Max Fisher: Of course.
Erin Ryan: –Sarah Palin. Specifically with regard to whether or not she was really the mother of her youngest child.
Max Fisher: Yeah. The Trig stuff was weird.
Erin Ryan: Which was really, really weird and gross.
Max Fisher: Yeah.
Erin Ryan: She had a young child who was born not long before she was nominated for McCain’s running mate, and there was some kind of public speculation that it was really her daughter’s kid and not hers, and that it wasn’t. People were like trying to dissect timelines, like it really mattered to her fitness or unfitness for office.
Max Fisher: Mm hmm. I actually worked at The Atlantic when this was happening, and the absolute leading figure on the like Trig Palin birthgate conspiracy theory was Andrew Sullivan, who worked there at that point.
Erin Ryan: Ugh.
Max Fisher: And he and his two interns literally took over a conference room and they called it the Trig Palin War Room, and no one was allowed to go in there because they were spending all day, every day trying to, like, blog their way into the truth about anyway.
Erin Ryan: That’s so gross.
Max Fisher: It’s gross.
Erin Ryan: Like That is so gross.
Max Fisher: Yes.
Erin Ryan: And like, nobody is talking in a gross way about women like that today. We’ve learned our lesson. [laughter] Um. Yeah. I mean, she was treated very oddly because she was unfit for office for many other reasons.
Max Fisher: Sure.
Erin Ryan: And uh–
Max Fisher: We just picked the wrong one to focus on.
Erin Ryan: We picked the wrong one. Yeah. Andrew Sullivan got it wrong. What?
Max Fisher: I was surprised too.
Erin Ryan: That’s craz– that never happened again.
Max Fisher: There is one other element of the, like Palin example that is really sticking in my head, which is that like, look, maybe McCain Palin were going to lose no matter what anyway. Maybe she like provided a boost. And then the like way that she pulled down the ticket equalized out to zero. But she did change the party forever.
Erin Ryan: Absolutely.
Max Fisher: In a way that, like, I don’t think McCain like at all anticipated or saw coming or like understood, which was reckless, foolhardy. And I think it’s it’s less likely because J.D. Vance is not as popular, but he does represent a real like turn for the Republican Party and the like version of the future it could have. And you do wonder if Trump elevating him into this disastrous ticket, even if it loses horribly, as I hope it does like does change the trajectory of the party in a way that, you know, I don’t think would be good.
Erin Ryan: So now it’s going to be run instead of by just a barking reality TV star who’s kind of smarmy, slimy–
Max Fisher: Peter Thiel’s [?].
Erin Ryan: –Ivy League.
Max Fisher: Yes.
Erin Ryan: –Peter Thiel lapdogs.
Max Fisher: I mean, if Vance follows the Palin example of like just by getting elevated, pulling the party in this direction, I feel like that’s where it would go, but who knows?
Erin Ryan: Great.
Max Fisher: Yeah. [laugh] [music break]
[AD BREAK]
Erin Ryan: So Max, to get some historical sweep in our investigation into dud VPs past and present. I also spoke to presidential historian Alexis Coe. And Alexis mentioned a name I hadn’t expected. Richard Nixon.
Max Fisher: Wait, Nixon? But he won four times. Twice as Eisenhower’s running mate in ’52 and ’56, and then twice leading the ticket in ’68 and ’72.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, but the first of those races was actually pretty iffy for Nixon. Here’s Alexis Coe to explain.
[clip of Alexis Coe] So in 1952, he made it on to Dwight Eisenhower’s ticket. And Eisenhower was, like pretty iffy about the whole thing. But at the time, Nixon was this, like, real star in America. And so Eisenhower went with it. And the thing that Nixon kept saying is, I don’t come from wealth, you know, I his parents owned a grocer, and um they owned a gas station. And, you know, at the same time, though, he had been bankrolled for a number of years by donors who were paying for expenses at the time, that was not unregulated. And Eisenhower really wanted that scandal to be the excuse to get Nixon off the ticket, because as the campaign progressed, it was the thing that people kept responding to, no matter what either candidate said. They wanted to talk about the money, about Nixon being this tricky Dick. So the conclusion was, okay, have a press conference. And he starts to give this impassioned speech about how he took money just a little bit for this and that. But here’s the thing. And then he he refocuses the argument. And this was just a completely winning line. He talked about how the one thing that was a gift was Checkers, a cute little spaniel that his little girls had loved. And no matter what happens, he’s not getting rid of the dog. The dog belongs to the girls, and the whole country was completely charmed.
Max Fisher: Okay, this story feels very relevant.
Erin Ryan: Yeah. Okay, so Vance needs to get his kids a puppy.
Max Fisher: [laugh] Honestly, that’s kind of what needs to happen. Is he just, like, I don’t like being in the position of giving JD Vance campaign–
Erin Ryan: Tips?
Max Fisher: Advice. Yeah.
Erin Ryan: I don’t think he’ll get a puppy. He doesn’t seem like a dog guy.
Max Fisher: I guess what I would say is that a lesson we have learned here is that in order to turn around a nosedive like this, what would have to happen is Vance would have to radically reframe the public’s understanding of him through something like this. And I don’t know that he has that in him.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, he would have to radically humanize himself. And the opportunity to do that often comes at the conventions when people’s–
Max Fisher: Right.
Erin Ryan: –spouses and–
Max Fisher: Yeah.
Erin Ryan: –people’s children.
Max Fisher: Right.
Erin Ryan: Have a chance to speak. I remember being at the Republican convention, covering it, not attending it, in 2012.
Max Fisher: You were a delegate, I thought right?
Erin Ryan: I was a delegate.
Max Fisher: Yeah.
Erin Ryan: For the great state of denial. Um. We were we were watching um the intro to to Mitt Romney as as the the nominee. And there were all of these videos of him with his grandkids and him with his kids. And unlike the Trump, you know, kid stuff, it was really charming. Like, Mitt Romney is a family man. And here’s his beautiful, kind seeming wife and his lovely children who authentically seem to admire him.
Max Fisher: Yeah.
Erin Ryan: Who seem like they were–
Max Fisher: Sure.
Erin Ryan: –brought up well and know him well because he was a hands on, involved father and is a hands on, involved grandpa. So there are all of these humanizing–
Max Fisher: You’re making me nostalgic for him.
Erin Ryan: I know, and well, it was almost as humanizing as that documentary that came out about Mitt Romney.
Max Fisher: I loved it.
Erin Ryan: On the campaign trail.
Max Fisher: That was great.
Erin Ryan: When he tried to iron a suit that was on his body.
Max Fisher: No, come on.
Erin Ryan: It was so–
Max Fisher: It’s sweet.
Erin Ryan: See? Right. So there are opportunities that these candidates have to humanize themselves. And the opportunities generally come at times when people who like them and know them are able to be the center of attention. And I just think that point has passed with Vance.
Max Fisher: I think that point has passed with Vance, and I think that’s a really good insight that it’s usually by invoking and surrounding yourself with your family. And what is the one topic that brings out the absolute weirdest shit that JD Vance says? Family.
Erin Ryan: Family.
Max Fisher: So that’s the one thing. That’s the one place he can’t go.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, yeah, he he’s just and also it brings out the absolute worst elements of the American right. Because–
Max Fisher: Yeah.
Erin Ryan: They are completely bothered by the fact that he is married to somebody who is Indian.
Max Fisher: Right.
Erin Ryan: And that his children are biracial. And and that is the gross attack that’s happening against JD Vance.
Max Fisher: Yeah, yeah.
Erin Ryan: Um. Alexis mentioned another problematic running mate, Dan Quayle, who ran alongside George H.W. Bush in the 1988 election. Here’s Alexis.
[clip of Alexis Coe] Quayle was immediately sort of divisive because he seemed secretive. That’s a big thing here. If your vice president is trying to hide something, it’s quite obvious from the beginning. And with Quayle, there was sort of a vulnerability with his academic record. He refused to release any of his records. And that actually would have been. It was a good thing and a bad thing. It was a good thing because he was not from a family of wealth like Bush. He did not um immediately go to these great schools. He had barely gotten in. But as it turns out um, he had failed the comprehensive examination for freshman at, I think, DePauw University. So it wasn’t the most flattering record. Um. And one of his former professors went on record when he wouldn’t give his records, because, of course, the media doesn’t just take no as an answer. They’re going to then go to the university they at least know you graduated from and talk to your old professors. And one of the old professors called him vapid.
Erin Ryan: Oh.
Max Fisher: Not great.
Erin Ryan: Back in the day, when being disliked by a professor was a liability.
Max Fisher: I know.
Erin Ryan: For a Republican.
Max Fisher: Wild to think.
Erin Ryan: I know. Another big hit for Quayle came in the vice presidential debate when he compared himself to JFK, [laughter] which yielded this famous line from his opponent, Democratic vice presidential nominee Lloyd Bentsen.
[clip of Lloyd Bentsen] Senator. I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy. [cheers from audience]
Erin Ryan: That would be made into merch if it was said today. Bush and Quayle did, of course, go on to win in November and by something of a landslide. So it’s hard to say for sure that Quayle did too much damage.
Max Fisher: Yeah, I went back and read some news articles from, like, the campaign about Dan Quayle, and they were all saying like, kind of what some people are saying now about J.D. Vance, where it’s like, look at the polls. Look at his low approval rating. There was one poll that people paid a lot of attention to where if you put Bush and Dukakis side by side, Dukakis being the Democratic candidate, Bush led by nine points. But if you put their VPs next to them, Bush only led by three points, which is a way to suggest that like having Dan Quayle next to George H.W. Bush really hurt him. But the thing is, is he went on to win by eight. So it just like I think maybe this is a case where like, yes, people didn’t like him. Yes, it did hurt the ticket in the sense of it’s the way that people viewed it, but I don’t get the sense that it actually changed that many votes.
Erin Ryan: I hate to harp on this because it’s kind of a cliche scapegoat, but back then, we were not living within the 24 hour nonstop news cycle.
Max Fisher: Right.
Erin Ryan: That we’re living in currently. And I have to imagine that if Dan Quayle could somehow be injected into the race as the vice presidential nominee today, we would have the internet. We would have kind of nonstop clips of him sounding and looking a little bit vapid.
Max Fisher: Yeah.
Erin Ryan: Um. And once that insult hit and started sticking, we would see that kind of constantly being fed to us. And I think back then it wasn’t as omnipresent. It wasn’t bombarding people all the time.
Max Fisher: Sure.
Erin Ryan: Like it is today. Um. Okay, Max. So there’s another big unknown variable in determining what effect JD Vance will end up having on the Republican ticket. And that variable is Donald Trump. I asked Alyssa, my Hysteria co-host and former vetter of running mates, what options Trump actually has if he decides that Vance is too much of a liability? Here’s Alyssa.
[clip of Alyssa Mastromonaco] I mean, any research on this topic literally leads you to if the VP had a stroke or died or something, you know, like that is that is not I mean, knock knock wood. I’m never going to be an asshole. Like, that’s not the case. So I really don’t know what options he has. If you do any sort of like conventional research, it says that by the time ballots are being printed, you know, the horse has left the barn like there’s no way to change the change the VP. But with Donald Trump, I guess you never know.
Erin Ryan: This all brings us back to our big question that we posed at the top of the show. Based on what we’ve seen in these past moments in history, is it possible that JD Vance could actually sink the entire Republican ticket?
Max Fisher: Well, look, I mean, to kind of level set, like we looked for all of the worst VP candidates that we could find in history, and we found four and two of them actually won their races. And the two who lost were probably going to lose anyway. So I think it’s just a reminder that even the like, absolute worst VP candidates in history. Like there’s not a ton of evidence that they can definitely pull down a ticket. There’s some that they can. It does feel like JD Vance is absolutely going to be in that top tier of worst VP candidates in terms of his impact on the ticket of all time, but I think that it’s tough to say exactly how much of an impact it’s going to have. If it if it turns out that he’s Palin scale somewhere between like the Palin scale and the Eagleton scale, that feels like that could be a couple of points off of their national vote share, which might be enough to swing it, though.
Erin Ryan: Mm hmm. I think that as long as the Trump campaign is having him front and center out there on the like, he, like Donald–
Max Fisher: Yeah.
Erin Ryan: Trump is not campaigning, and Donald Trump is the reason that people are voting for that ticket, not JD Vance.
Max Fisher: That’s a good point.
Erin Ryan: Nobody is voting for Trump Vance.
Max Fisher: Right.
Erin Ryan: Because of Vance.
Max Fisher: Right.
Erin Ryan: I think you could maybe propose that there are people out there who are voting for Harris Walz, partly because of Walz, they’re excited about Walz, which I don’t think is happening with the Trump Vance ticket.
Max Fisher: No.
Erin Ryan: At all.
Max Fisher: It really doesn’t seem like it.
Erin Ryan: So I don’t think that Trump can blame Vance for his campaign floundering at this point, because he’s not doing shit. He’s got to go out and campaign himself if he wants to try to bring his numbers back up.
Max Fisher: Right. But that’s it’s a good point. The fact that he’s not campaigning is taking all of the things that make Vance a drag on the ticket and exacerbating all of them, and like Vance, of course, is himself exacerbating it. And it’s also now we’ve just got a self-perpetuating cycle where everybody sees it. So we’re all looking for it, and there’s so much evidence of it, because this guy is so fucking online and he’s been on so many podcasts that like, there’s just a lot of evidence of him saying bad shit. Knowing all this, how do you think it’s likely to play out, like for Vance and his role on the ticket?
Erin Ryan: Okay, so I have a wild theory.
Max Fisher: Okay.
Erin Ryan: And I have like–
Max Fisher: Okay.
Erin Ryan: –a reasonable theory. My reasonable theory is that they’ll sort of kind of float on to the election. And I think Donald Trump is fundamentally a lazy person. Um. And so he will do as little work as possible to try to achieve victory. And then after, um if he doesn’t win outright on election night or if he loses by any close election, hopefully he’ll just put all of his effort into fighting the results.
Max Fisher: Right.
Erin Ryan: Um.
Max Fisher: Or he’ll blame Vance forever.
Erin Ryan: Or he’ll blame Vance forever. Which would be–
Max Fisher: –funny.
Erin Ryan: Funny, but–
Max Fisher: Yeah.
Erin Ryan: Funnier still would be if Trump tried to fire Vance. Which–
Max Fisher: Oh my God.
Erin Ryan: –is technically possible.
Max Fisher: Right.
Erin Ryan: Because like a lot of people, I went down a rabbit hole when Vance started–.
Max Fisher: Yes.
Erin Ryan: –tanking and I looked up the Republican Party rules.
Max Fisher: The deadlines.
Erin Ryan: Exactly. So the vice president can be replaced on the ticket after the convention if and only if they reconvene a convention, which can be done digitally with a third of the delegates. So they would have to, you know, reconvene a digital convention and revote on the vice presidential nominee in order to replace Vance. But time is of the essence because different states have different deadlines, and the longer time goes by, the less states actually could replace Trump on the ticket because the ballot deadline would have expired. So Trump could do something wild and try to to regain attention and regain headlines by firing Vance, which would be very chaotic. But Max, you and I agreed it would be very–
Max Fisher: It would be very funny.
Erin Ryan: Very funny.
Max Fisher: Yup.
Erin Ryan: The humiliation of JD Vance would just be–
Max Fisher: It would be amazing.
Erin Ryan: Utter and complete.
Max Fisher: I think it’s unlikely that he will, like, formally fire him because it’s very complicated. He won’t know how to do it. He’ll start to hear no’s from lawyers and like won’t like that. I think that that it is much likelier probably not the likeliest outcome, but likely that he will try to fire JD Vance by Truth Social post. That he will just post that like I have fired JD Vance and then just hope that it it’s like that that bit from the Office. I’m declaring bankruptcy.
Erin Ryan: Yeah. Right.
Max Fisher: And then the campaign will just be forced to go on with this zombie veep where like JD Vance is formally on the ticket, but Trump is pretending that he’s not and that that is what I am crossing my fingers for. And that’s what America should be crossing its fingers for.
Erin Ryan: That would be really, really funny. I am crossing my fingers, but also I hate myself, so I don’t know if it’s best for America. It sounds like it goes into the bad for America.
Max Fisher: Sure. Okay, that’s fair.
Erin Ryan: But but funny category.
Max Fisher: That’s fair.
Erin Ryan: Okay, Max, to bring us back to the stakes because there are stakes here of all of this. Let’s go out with a clip from someone we haven’t heard from directly yet. Here’s J.D. Vance himself turning on the charm for a rally on Wednesday in Byron Center in Michigan.
[clip of J.D. Vance] She says she’s having fun, but while she’s having fun, Americans are suffering under her policies. When she laughs during a speech, remember that there are American families crying this very day because they cannot afford groceries. [hosts laughing in background] When she does these rallies and does these events and does these fake dances, remember that there are parents who lost their children to drugs or violence who will never see their children move again, much less dance again.
[spoken together] What?
Max Fisher: What?
Erin Ryan: What?
Max Fisher: What does that mean?
Erin Ryan: How has he figured out the creepiest possible way to say everything?
Max Fisher: You’re not allowed to dance anymore, J.D. Vance’s America, because a child somewhere is suffering. That child’s not going to dance anymore, Erin.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, we are the tiny town from Footloose, nationalized. No dancing until all the kids are alive.
Max Fisher: Okay, I’m changing my vote. I hope he stays in the ticket forever. [laughter] [music break] How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher, and by Erin Ryan.
Erin Ryan: It’s produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer.
Max Fisher: Evan Sutton mixes and edits the show.
Erin Ryan: Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landes, and Vasilis Fotopoulos.
Max Fisher: Production support from Adriene Hill, Leo Duran, Erica Morrison, Raven Yamamoto, and Natalie Bettendorf.
Erin Ryan: And a special thank you to What a Day’s talented hosts Tre’vell Anderson, Priyanka Aribindi, Josie Duffy Rice, and Juanita Tolliver for welcoming us to the family. [music break]
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