For about as long as he’s been part of the 2024 presidential race, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) appeared to be a weight around Donald Trump’s ankles — possibly even the most unpopular running mate in modern history.
Vance’s 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.
But that might be changing, after Vance’s well-received debate performance last week.
A number of polls conducted since that debate suggest Vance’s image has improved somewhat. While for many weeks they showed him double-digits underwater — a stark contrast to Democratic running mate Tim Walz’s relatively good image ratings — Vance appears to be inching closer to parity.
The evidence thus far is limited. But at the very least, Vance doesn’t appear to be as much of a drag on Trump.
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’s relatively normal for politicians to be slightly unpopular these days.
New Wall Street Journal polls of seven key swing states released Friday showed Vance’s split in those states at 41-44 — not much different from Walz’s 40-40 split.
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’s ballots.
The Quinnipiac polls showed Vance averaging a 43-44 split in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Walz was at 44-39 — while The Post’s poll showed Vance with a positive 49-42 split in Ohio.
That last one might not seem that impressive, given Ohio leans red and is Vance’s home state. But he hasn’t 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.
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.
The YouGov polling provides more detail on how views of Vance have improved.
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).
Previous YouGov polling showed Americans were significantly more likely to say Vance was not ready to serve as president — by nine points in July and 13 points in August — but now they’re about evenly split (37-39).
As for last week’s 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.
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’s viewers skewed more Democratic than Republican.
Things could still change as the debate fades in people’s 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.
But for now, the large gap in views of the two running mates appears to have shrunk, and Vance isn’t really looking like much of a liability in the all-important swing states.