The next candidate to drop out

 It has only been a few days since President Joe Biden made history by announcing that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president after winning the 2024 primaries. Now, the word on the street is that Biden may not be the only candidate who won’t finish the race.

Unfortunately, I’m not talking about Donald Trump.

Photo by Simone Secci on Unsplash

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Rather, there is a lot of talk that Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, may be an endangered species. It’s unlikely that Vance will literally drop out of a window, a risk that his Russian counterpart might face, but there are signs that Donald Trump is underwhelmed with Vance’s performance so far and is second-guessing his choice.

“But Trump hires the best people!” you might protest as you wonder why Vance’s stock collapsed only a week after being tapped for the ticket. The answer comes in multiple parts.

One of the first things that I noticed about Trump’s choice of Vance was that it angered the remaining conservatives in the Republican Party. Reagan Republicans who are squishy on Trump are more firmly opposed to Vance. I saw more than a few Twitter users who said that Vance’s inclusion might be enough to sway them from voting for a third-party candidate to voting Democrat.

You might be wondering why Vance would swing fence sitters over to Team Biden (now Team Harris) when the nomination of a populist demagogue who tried to steal his last election through force didn’t. That left me scratching my head as well. Vance is an opponent of free trade and favors central economic planning and higher minimum wages, but then again, the old guy at the top of the ticket shares a lot of those positions as well.

Part of the answer may lie with Vance’s open hostility to Ukraine while The Former Guy is more circumspect about his future foreign policy. Republicans are split on whether to support Ukraine, but it is typically the traditional conservative wing of the party, the Reagan remnant, that favors a strong foreign policy and opposition to Russia over Trumpian isolationism.

At any rate, from that perspective, picking Vance as a running mate may have a negative impact on Trump’s campaign. If the inclusion of Vance pushes fence-sitters toward the Democrats, it would be a good reason to jettison him for a running mate who is more appealing to moderate voters.

If Vance’s beliefs are alarming to conservatives, his abilities on the campaign trail aren’t much better. George Conway described the Ohio senator as having “a Desantis-like way with people,” which is damning with faint praise I’ve ever heard it.

Jonah Goldberg criticized Vance on Chris Wallace’s show saying, “He’s only won one political race, and he won it in a state where the Republican governor of Ohio overperformed him by like 20 points, and where Trump overperformed him as well. He doesn’t have natural chops as a politician…. He just doesn’t have a lot of experience talking to audiences that don’t already agree with him.”

To make things worse, it isn’t clear if the Trump campaign did a thorough job of vetting Vance. It is well known that Vance, once a Never Trump author and one-term red-state senator, compared Donald Trump to Hitler, but a newer revelation is that Vance also repeatedly said that he believed that Trump had committed sexual assault. (In fact, last year Trump was held liable for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll by a civil jury.) There are probably more skeletons yet to be unearthed such as Vance’s offensive comments about women.

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A vice presidential candidate is supposed to boost the candidate at the top of the ticket. At best, it seems that Vance is going to be a distraction from the MAGA message similar to how Sarah Palin had to be defended by John McCain’s campaign rather than going on the attack. As Democrats learned with Joe Biden, it’s tough to focus your fire on the opposition’s problems when you’re constantly playing defense.

So if JD Vance doesn’t bring additional voters on board the Trump Train, doesn’t reassure skeptics of MAGA, and isn’t an effective messenger for Donald Trump, why is he on the ticket? The answer appears to be two-fold. NBC News reported that Trump was set to pick North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum when, in the words of a Republican insider, “Don Jr. and Eric went bats--- crazy” and strongly advocated for Vance. Elon Musk also reportedly pushed Vance.

Per the reporting, Burgum was viewed as a liability because of his association with a new North Dakota law that banned nearly all abortions. Burgum’s signature on the law was at odds with Trump’s attempt to assume a more pro-choice position in the wake of Dobbs.

Vance has also historically supported strict anti-abortion legislation, but he has already started drifting toward a pro-choice position. The move may play well with some voters but will also contribute to his reputation as a flipflopper.

Marco Rubio was reportedly also a finalist for the VP slot, but the fact that both Trump and Rubio are Florida residents presented a constitutional problem. NBC’s sources do not indicate that this was the dealbreaker for Rubio, however.

Tim Alberta of The Atlantic goes further, writing that the selection of Vance was “borne of cockiness, meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.”

In other words, Trump doubled down on a MAGA vice president because he believed that Joe Biden would be easy to beat. He wasn’t concerned with reaching out to moderates or swing state voters or disaffected conservatives or Trump skeptics. Egged on by his sons and other MAGA advisors, Trump chose to continue preaching to his amen chorus rather than trying to win new voters.

The only problem is that the state of the race is much different this week than it was last week. For four years, the Republican Party has been gearing up to run against Joe Biden, but now Joe Biden is not the candidate.

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It now seems that agreeing to the early debate in June was a strategic error. If the debate had occurred after the convention, it would be much more difficult for Democrats to replace their standard bearer. The debate worked too well for Trump. It not only undermined faith in Biden but forced him out of the race.

Now the Trump campaign must shift its strategy against a new and stronger opponent. (The awkwardness is illustrated by how Republican congressional leaders felt the need to advise members not to attack Kamala Harris’s race or claim that she is a “DEI” pick.) In the remade race, Vance looks more like a liability than a way to wrack up extra points.

The problem is that Vance is more difficult to replace than Biden. Joe Biden’s problems were obvious to a majority of Democratic voters. Similarly, Republicans aren’t sold on JD Vance, but he is mentally and physically fit to campaign. Dropping Vance would make Trump look indecisive and incompetent. After all, he hires the best people, and picking a running mate is one of the biggest decisions that a presidential candidate makes.

And unlike the Biden-Harris switch, the Republican candidates have been formally nominated, which complicates matters. It isn’t clear whether there is a procedure to make this swap at all. There did not seem to be such a procedure in October 2016 when the Access Hollywood scandal broke. As the countdown toward the election continues and state ballot deadlines arrive, the problem of replacing the VP nominee only gets worse. (And if the Republicans are going to swap anyone, it would ideally be Trump… or both Trump and Vance.)

Having said that, dropping a vice presidential candidate is not unprecedented. In 1972, Democrat George McGovern nominated Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri as his running mate. Two weeks after the Democratic convention, Eagleton admitted that he had been treated for depression with electrical shock therapy. Ninety-nine days before the election, he withdrew from the race and was replaced on the ticket by Sargent Shriver. McGovern’s judgment and competence became an issue and he went down to a 49-state defeat at the hands of Richard Nixon.

For this reason, I am very skeptical that Donald Trump will dump Vance. Whatever the downside of Vance as a running mate, it is outweighed by the risks and difficulty of making a change. Donald Trump and Republicans may not be thrilled with JD Vance, but they are stuck with him.

And if Trump loses again, Vance will be a convenient scapegoat.

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BIDEN BYE-KU: It occurred to me that we didn’t write a bye-ku for Joe Biden when he dropped out of the race. (For new readers, we have continued the tradition of The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto in writing a farewell haiku to presidential candidates who end their campaigns.) Enjoy!

Scrappy Joe made it

Met Donald in a rumble

Dumped due to mumbles

From the Racket News

Living in interesting times

 One of my favorite films is the classic aircraft disaster movie, “Airplane!” You may be thinking, “Surely, you can’t be serious.” Well, I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley.”

One of the tropes in the movie is that McCroskey, the FAA official played by Lloyd Bridges, periodically says, “I picked the wrong week to quit” various habits as the crisis unfolds.

Last week, I felt like McCroskey.

As Steve mentioned, I was on vacation last week. We went to visit my son who is stationed in Texas in the Air Force. Ethan was having his wisdom teeth out so it was a combination of family support and social visit since the procedure came with several days off. I was also feeling a bit burned out from writing.

Doing two or three pieces a week in addition to a regular job can be a bit time-consuming and draining. Steve has the more difficult schedule usually, but our production underscores the fact that we do this because we enjoy writing and not because it’s a lucrative venture for us. Nevertheless, I left my laptop at home and determined to enjoy the family break.

Anyway, the news started breaking shortly before we left with the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and continued through the week with the bizarre Republican convention and the nomination of J.D. Vance for vice president. I didn’t watch much of the convention, but it occurred to me that, not only does the choice of Vance mark a clear break between the old pre-Trump, conservative GOP and the current populist MAGA Republican Party, but it essentially puts two former Democrats at the top of the ticket. (Vance might not have been a registered Democrat, but he has strong Democrat ties and at least considered voting for Hillary in 2016.) Nice going, Republicans.

Midway through the week, I woke up to a flurry of messages on my phone from my company’s IT department as computer systems crashed around the country. We were mostly insulated from the ongoing technical disaster except that when we shifted from an Airbnb to a hotel, the hotel employees were unable to make key cards. We literally had to have an employee walk with us to the room and let us in with a special device every time we left and returned.

Thankfully, we weren’t flying home that day. Untold numbers of people were trying to use the airlines and that seems to have been yet another cascading disaster. Thousands of flights were canceled around the country, stranding travelers and disrupting plans. Some still aren’t at their destinations.

The funny thing (in a weird and curious sense anyway) is that normally we would have flown Delta since we live near Atlanta. This time, however, I bought tickets on Southwest because it was quite a bit cheaper. Southwest has had its share of meltdowns in the past, but this week the Texas airline’s antiquated computer systems seemed to work in its favor. On Sunday, as Delta passengers were still scrambling to get to their destinations, our Southwest flight was only 10 minutes late and that was due to a series of storms that moved across Dallas earlier in the day.

And speaking of Sunday, as we were heading to the airport, we got the news that President Biden had ended his reelection campaign. I had told my wife and son earlier that I thought he would drop out. The signs were there. Polls were declining, Democratic politicians were calling on him to quit, and donor money was drying up. I figured that it was just a matter of time, but when the end came, it came quickly.

After giving Biden the benefit of the doubt after his disastrous debate performance, I called on the president to step aside a couple of weeks ago. It took some time for him to see the light, but I applaud Biden for doing the right thing for the country, even if some coercion was necessary. I can’t imagine Trump bowing out no matter what the situation looked like for him, his party, or the country.

And I can’t imagine Republican officials taking the steps that were necessary to persuade Biden to drop out. I’ll give the Democratic leadership credit here as well. Twice. In 2020, Democrats united around Biden to freeze out Bernie Sanders, who would probably have lost to Trump. In 2024, they united to get Biden to step down as he was in the process of losing to Trump.

Democrats put their money where their mouths are when it comes to sounding the alarm on Trump. It would have been easier to let Biden go down in flames and preserve party unity than it would have to risk a Democratic civil war… if the stakes were not so high. Trump really is a very dangerous man who cannot be trusted with power and the desperate move to dump Biden reflects that understanding by Democrats (although I do have problems with their boosting of MAGA candidates in Republican primaries).

Imagine if Republican leaders in 2016 had been organized, strong, and courageous. If they had united to oppose Trump at the convention or after the Access Hollywood scandal, the past eight years would have been very different. Republicans might still have won the 2016 election, albeit with a conservative candidate who could have spearheaded a legitimately conservative agenda and who would have been competent to deal with the pandemic, Vladimir Putin’s aggression, and Chinese saber rattling.

And any Republican other than Trump would have probably won reelection in 2020 or would have triumphed over an incumbent Hillary Clinton. Any Republican other than Trump would not have led the party into the box canyon of falsely claiming the election was stolen, a lie that contributed to the 2022 midterm losses. With any candidate other than Trump, January 6 would not be a stain on the Republican Party’s honor and the GOP would not be a personality cult.

A few years ago, I pondered how recent history has unfolded. Without the September 11 attacks and the Iraq War, we would not have gotten Barack Obama, or at least not when we did. In 2008, Obama was a junior senator who was inexperienced in leadership and legislating. Without Obama, who broke the Republican Party and drove it crazy, we don’t get Trump, who is like Obama in more ways than either party wants to admit. Errors and bad choices are compounded and magnified in a graveyard spiral, to use an aviation term for a loss of control in which a pilot thinks he is flying straight and level in the clouds but is really turning in increasingly tight circles that will lead to a stall and crash unless corrected.

But enough about history. The current question is what comes next. It seems likely that the answer is Kamala Harris, but no one knows for sure.

I’ve thought many times in recent years that the current primary system is a failure. Candidate quality has declined since primaries became the method for choosing candidates and that should be no surprise since allowing partisans to choose nominees rewards partisanship. The classic “smoke-filled-room” method of choosing candidates may have been partisan but party bosses did a much better job of considering factors like electability, character, and sanity.

What we are about to see is a version of the old smoke-filled rooms. There won’t be a true choice by the party bosses since it is so late in the process, but what we are about to see is a modern version of a party boss convention. I think that the primary system that gave us Trump three times, Biden twice, and very nearly gave us Bernie Sanders is badly in need of reform and safety valves. That may be undemocratic (small “d”) but democracy without checks and balances is just a tyranny of the majority.

We are watching history being written as the Democrats pick a nominee, and let me just say that I’m tired of it.

There is supposedly an ancient Chinese curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.” This may be about as authentic as mistranslated Chinese character tattoos that end up meaning something like “Ramen noodles” or “illiterate foreigner,” but I do second that emotion.

As a longtime history geek, I can remember as a college student in 1991 thinking that a war would be kind of cool and historic. What can I say? I was a dumb kid with no real concept of war. That kind of naive thinking probably explains a lot of wars and the people who sign up to fight them.

Fast-forward a few decades and I’ve seen quite enough history being made, thank you very much. We’ve seen a lot of history being written just in the past few weeks, months, and years, and one thing I’ve come to realize is that history is cool to read about but it isn’t always cool to experience first-hand. We know how the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II turned out, but it wasn’t obvious to people in the middle of them. And there was a lot of pain and sacrifice required to find that closure.

As I get older, I think I’ll be happier with a nice boring few decades. I’ve seen enough history to suit my tastes.

And I think that’s what this election is going to boil down to. I hope that Kamala Harris or whoever the ultimate Democratic nominee is makes the election about a return to normalcy and boredom. I don’t think that most Americans want a “Second American Revolution.” I don’t think they want to look at their phones every day afraid to see what new inanity Donald Trump has come up with or how Joe Biden misspoke last night. I think that most Americans just want to be left alone to live their lives. Americans want a government that functions smoothly and quietly.

Kamala Harris (or whoever) just needs to be sane, because sanity is not what is on display with the MAGA Republican Party. And I expect MAGA to become more unhinged (and probably racist) as Kamala moves to the forefront. I’ve already seen lots of discussions about how she is not a natural-born citizen because her parents were not US citizens. (Spoiler alert: This warmed-over birther conspiracy theory from the Obama days is false because Kamala was born in California. It doesn’t matter if her parents were citizens or not as long as they weren’t foreign diplomats or part of an invading army.)

I think the move to nudge Biden aside is a good one and interesting from a historical perspective. It will probably be a trivia question that most of us have direct memories of within a decade or so, but let’s vote to stop making things interesting.

Let’s get back to boring.

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THANKS TO STEVE AND MERRIE: I want to take a moment here to thank Steve and Merrie Soltis for covering for me last week. We do try to keep fresh content on our page even though we aren’t a large operation. I really appreciate them stepping up so that I could goof off for a bit.

From the Racket News