The right to access abortion is a core issue for Democrats, and J.D. Vance is on the record supporting a national ban. The Ohio senator won’t be saying that anymore now that he’s Donald Trump’s running mate, but he’ll be reminded of that and other inconvenient truths by a practiced prosecutor, Vice President Kamala Harris, when they meet next month on the debate stage.
The vice-presidential debate is one of the few bright spots for Democrats, beset by infighting over whether to replace President Biden as their nominee. “Harris will take him to the cleaners,” says Elaine Kamarck with the Brookings Institution, who has done extensive research on the power of the abortion issue to drive votes. “One of her strengths is as a prosecutor, and you can see her taking Vance apart on the issue.”
There’s plenty to take apart in statements Vance has made and positions he has taken that make him a natural for the MAGA base. His selection as vice president received a muted reception at the first night of the GOP Convention in Milwaukee. A freshman senator just two years into his term who’s never been elected to anything else doesn’t have much of a calling card in an arena where Trump is king. But he brings a keen intellect and a fighting spirit to a ticket where Trump sees him as a legacy pick, cementing Trumpism into the future should they win in November.
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The veep contenders bring generational change with Vance, at 39, the youngest person nominated to a national ticket this century, and Harris, 59, 22 years younger than Biden. They also personify a diversifying America, with Harris who is both Indian and African-American and Vance married to the daughter of Indian immigrants.
All the ingredients are there for a charged and deeply personal skirmish in the culture war with Harris ready to call out Vance for a long list of objectionable statements, and Vance prepared to echo Trump’s favorite line about Democrats favoring abortion “into the eighth, ninth month, even after birth,” a false assertion on its face, but which allows Republicans to label Democrats the real extremists.
Vance has railed against what he calls “the childless left,” elected Democrats like AOC, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg (who since became a father), lamenting as a senatorial candidate three years ago “that in America, family formation, our birth rates, a ton of indicators of family health have collapsed.”
In a debate with Democrat Tim Ryan in October 2022, Vance said he has “always believed in reasonable exceptions” to abortion prohibitions. The Cleveland Plain Dealer followed up and called his campaign to find out what those exceptions were. There were none cited.
Asked in 2021, in an interview with Spectrum News in Ohio, whether anti-abortion laws should include rape and incest exceptions, he replied: “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” Elaborating, he said: “At the end of day, we are talking about an unborn baby. What kind of society do we want to have? A society that looks at unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded?”
When pressed, he criticized the question: “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.”
This is culture war stuff, and Harris shouldn’t let Vance obfuscate what he has said while Vance will be under orders to temper his most explosive lines. Trump campaign advisers are looking at an open field for victory if they can reassure independents that a Trump-Vance ticket won’t be too extremist.
“I don’t think he’ll directly attack her for not having children of her own,” says Jack Pitney, professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College, “but he’ll recognize his own role as a parent and as someone who believes in traditional families. He’ll say, ‘I’m in touch with the struggles of ordinary families in a culture that makes it much harder.’ The Harris campaign shouldn’t underestimate him. He’s Trump with good grammar.”
Vance and his wife, Usha, a lawyer whom he met when they were both at Yale Law School, were married 10 years ago and have three children. Vance’s 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy chronicles his difficult childhood raised by his grandparents while his mother was in the throes of addiction with multiple marriages and divorces. That experience shaped his views, including his views on women staying in violent marriages, a characterization that he disputes.
In his book, Vance describes his grandmother pouring lighter fluid on his grandfather and striking a match after he came home drunk, threatening to follow through on her previous threat to kill him if he came home drunk again. Yet they stuck it out, they stayed together, which Vance commends while faulting “the sexual revolution” for making people think they could “shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term. And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.”
Vance is a novice on the national stage, not unlike Republican Senator Dan Quayle, vaulted to the vice presidency at a young age by George H.W. Bush. Quayle was quickly in over his head and is remembered mainly for misspelling potato with an e and launching a culture war attack against Murphy Brown, a fictional television broadcaster, for having a baby while unmarried. In May of 1992, as the presidential campaign was heating up, that was the wrong message for a generation of women coming into their own. Vance too makes some good arguments, but for women worried about losing their reproductive rights, he sounds too pat and opportunistic to be trusted.
