Groveling won't help Sen. J.D. Vance become Trump's vice president pick

Sen. J.D. Vance, a Cincinnati Republican, is panting to become Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate assuming, as is all but certain, the GOP nominates Trump for the presidency.

The question is what Vance would bring to a 2024 Trump candidacy that Trump wouldn’t otherwise have if Vance sticks to his knitting as an increasing bellicose GOP legislator.

If it’s a matter of Ohio appeal, Trump drew 53.2% of Ohio’s vote (against Joseph R. Biden) in 2020 and 51.3% in 2016 (against Hillary Clinton). It appears likelier than not Trump could carry Ohio again this November.

True, Vance is young (age 39), in contrast to Trump (age 77) – Biden is age 81 – and Vance has a compelling personal story, told in his best-selling autobiography, “Hillbilly Elegy, a Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” a chronicle of his life from Appalachian roots in Middletown to graduation from Yale Law School. (He is also a U.S. Marine Corps veteran.)

The last Ohioan to run as a major party nominee for vice president was Republican then-Gov. John W. Bricker in 1944, who was the running mate of the GOP’s presidential nominee, New York Gov. Thomas Dewey. Dewey and Bricker challenged President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was seeking (and won) a fourth term, with Missouri’s Harry Truman as Roosevelt’s vice presidential running mate.

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Although Roosevelt and Truman won nationally, Dewey and Bricker narrowly carried Ohio, drawing 50.2% of the state’s vote to 49.8% for FDR and Truman, with some of the Dewey-Bricker ticket’s strongest showings is isolationist western Ohio counties. That, coincidentally, where Vance also ran very strongly in his 2022 Senate race against Democratic nominee Tim Ryan, of suburban Warren. Statewide, Vance drew 53.3% of Ohio’s senatorial vote.

Vance supports Trump election lies

A week ago, all but auditioning to be Trump’s running mate, Vance told television interviewer George Stephanopoulos, that unlike then-Vice President Mike Pence in 2021, Vance “wouldn’t have resisted [Trump’s] entreaties to reject electoral votes from several swing states that Biden won to keep Trump in the White House,” Cleveland.com’s Sabrina Eaton reported.

And on Tuesday, Vance used a barnyard epithet – in a press release – to deride a proposed deal that would tie proposed security legislation about the U.S.-Mexico border with aid for Ukraine in defending itself against Russia.

Yet earlier that same day, Vance – in another press release – spoke almost lyrically about the bipartisan congressional introduction, with Michigan Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow and others, of the proposed Great Lakes Restoration Initiative Act of 2024. (The House members collaborating on the measure include Reps. David Joyce, a South Russell Republican; Marcy Kaptur, a Toledo Democrat; and Bill Huizenga, a Republican, and Debbie Dingell, a Democrat, both of Michigan.)

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Vance has similarly attended to other Ohio matters, such as steady focus (by Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, too) on the catastrophic Norfolk Southern train derailment in Columbiana County’s East Palestine – a site that Biden, at this writing, had yet to visit. And Vance and Brown have collaborated on a proposed Railway Safety Act aimed at preventing future disasters such as the one East Palestine has suffered.

Younger vice president candidates appealing

Given Trump’s and Biden’s ages, focus on the vice presidential nomination is only natural. Likely as not Democrats will renominate Biden’s running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, age 59. (The last time Democrats dumped an incumbent vice president was in 1944, when the party replaced Vice President Henry Wallace with Truman.)

Ambition being what it is, Vance’s pitch for the GOP vice presidential nomination is only natural. But it also verges on the unseemly when Vance virtually kowtows, as he has, to Trump’s delusions about the 2020 election returns, and when Vance, as he did in another part of his interview with Stephanopolous, suggested a president should have the power to unilaterally fire and replace federal people working in the federal bureaucracy. If Vance remembers history, he’ll recall an earlier senator from Cincinnati, albeit a Democrat, George Pendleton, created the modern federal civil service in the 1880s.

Time is on Vance’s side. A good record, if he builds one, will bring him higher office; groveling won’t.

Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. tsuddes@gmail.com

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: A Trump-Vance ticket? Senator's groveling won't help him earn nod