For about as long as he\u2019s been part of the 2024 presidential race, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) appeared to be a weight around Donald Trump\u2019s ankles \u2014 possibly even the most unpopular running mate in modern history.<\/p>\n
Vance\u2019s 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio was far from resounding, and his early performances on the 2024 campaign trail seemed to confirm that he was not exactly a political star-in-waiting and was maybe even a mistake by Trump.<\/p>\n
But that might be changing, after Vance\u2019s well-received debate performance last week.<\/p>\n
A number of polls conducted since that debate suggest Vance\u2019s image has improved somewhat. While for many weeks they showed him double-digits underwater \u2014 a stark contrast to Democratic running mate Tim Walz\u2019s relatively good image ratings \u2014 Vance appears to be inching closer to parity.<\/p>\n
The evidence thus far is limited. But at the very least, Vance doesn\u2019t appear to be as much of a drag on Trump.<\/p>\n
Both an Economist\/YouGov poll and a Yahoo\/YouGov poll over the past week have shown Vance with his best image splits since Trump chose him as his vice-presidential candidate in July. Among registered voters, Vance was just three points underwater in first poll (45 percent favorable versus 48 percent unfavorable) and six points underwater (43-49) in the second one. In neither poll is he in positive territory, but it\u2019s relatively normal for politicians to be slightly unpopular these days.<\/p>\n
New Wall Street Journal polls of seven key swing states released Friday showed Vance\u2019s split in those states at 41-44 \u2014 not much different from Walz\u2019s 40-40 split.<\/p>\n
And recent state polling from The Washington Post and Quinnipiac University both show Vance is no longer the least popular candidate among the four who will appear atop people\u2019s ballots.<\/p>\n
The Quinnipiac polls showed Vance averaging a 43-44 split in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin \u2014 Walz was at 44-39 \u2014 while The Post\u2019s poll showed Vance with a positive 49-42 split in Ohio.<\/p>\n
That last one might not seem that impressive, given Ohio leans red and is Vance\u2019s home state. But he hasn\u2019t been terribly popular there. He not only performed worse than any other statewide Republican in 2022, but earlier polling from the New York Times and Siena College showed he was underwater even there.<\/p>\n
The new Post poll actually showed he had a better image in his home state than anybody else on the presidential ballot. His image was also better than that of Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown (45-42) and nearly on-par with that of long-popular Republican Gov. Mike DeWine (41-32), who won reelection in 2022 by 25 points.<\/p>\n
The YouGov polling provides more detail on how views of Vance have improved.<\/p>\n
For instance, Americans back in August were about evenly split on whether Trump had made the right or wrong decision in selecting Vance. They now say Trump made the right call by a nine-point margin (38-29).<\/p>\n
Previous YouGov polling showed Americans were significantly more likely to say Vance was not ready to serve as president \u2014 by nine points in July and 13 points in August \u2014 but now they\u2019re about evenly split (37-39).<\/p>\n
As for last week\u2019s debate, the YouGov polling shows twice as many independents said the debate made them think better of Vance (41 percent) than made them think worse of him (19 percent). Independents were about evenly split on whether it improved or hurt their views of Walz.<\/p>\n
Part of the reason Vance did better than Walz on that last question might be because those independents had a dimmer view of him to begin with; in other words, he had more room to grow with them. But the polling would seem to reinforce the idea that Vance did plenty of good for himself. Instant post-debate polls showed a relatively even contest, but those same polls also showed that the debate\u2019s viewers skewed more Democratic than Republican.<\/p>\n
Things could still change as the debate fades in people\u2019s memories; Vance has certainly demonstrated that he can create problems for himself. And even with his improved numbers, Vance is still more unpopular than the vast majority of recent running mates, who like Walz are generally viewed favorably.<\/p>\n
But for now, the large gap in views of the two running mates appears to have shrunk, and Vance isn\u2019t really looking like much of a liability in the all-important swing states.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
For about as long as he\u2019s been part of the 2024 presidential race, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) appeared to be a weight around Donald Trump\u2019s ankles \u2014 possibly even the most unpopular running mate in modern history. Vance\u2019s 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio was far from resounding, and his early performances on the 2024 campaign […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10968,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}