A former Republican strategist claims Donald Trump supporters have a major problem with JD Vance’s performance in Tuesday’s vice presidential debate: He was too nice.
That’s according to Stuart Stevens, now a senior adviser to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.
“Dive into hard core MAGA social media,” he wrote on X. “A lot of them hated Vance’s debate. They wanted Vance to expose Harris as the devil. Instead he was on a personal rehabilitation campaign aimed at 2028.”
Vance couldn’t really go anywhere but up before the debate. After Democrats slapped him with the label “weird,” and played up his past criticisms of “childless cat ladies” and assertions that immigrants were kidnapping and eating pets, Vance’s favorability was in the tank. Polls found vastly more voters disliked him than liked him.
He seemed to turn that around on Tuesday, when he came off as civil and kind. He even expressed empathy for Walz’s son, who once witnessed a shooting, and engaged in warm handshakes and conversation with Tim Walz before and after the debate. A flash poll from CNN found debate watchers’ favorability rating of Vance improved by 10 percentage points.
“He had a strategy, instead of attacking Harris, to hug Walz, which is probably good for JD Vance in a long term sense,” Stevens told the Daily Beast. “He has a history of reinventing and this was sort of another stage in that. What did he need to be to get on the ticket? He needed to be ultra MAGA, attacking cat ladies.”
Now that he’s made it on the ticket, Stevens thinks he has a different mission.
“He’s getting killed in popular opinion,” Stevens added. “He tried to come across as sort of a Romney-Bush area, open-minded problem-solver.”
The senator’s measured performance was nearly the opposite of Trump’s off-the-rails debate last month, which could make MAGAworld mad. And it’s true that Vance spent much of the evening focused on himself, which might rub a president who expects absolute loyalty the wrong way.
Still, Vance did go after Harris multiple times. “What have Kamala Harris’s policies actually led to?” he asked Tuesday night. “More energy production in China, more manufacturing overseas, more doing business in some of the dirtiest parts of the entire world.”
Some Republican strategists suggested Stevens was spreading a false narrative. One national operative dismissed the claim outright. Another, veteran GOP strategist Jason Roe, also implied that the debate went swimmingly.
“Vance probably did more to help the Trump-Vance ticket than Trump is capable and that apparently makes Stevens very mad,” Roe told the Daily Beast.
