How J.D. Vance’s Shocking Inexperience Turned Into an Asset

J.D. Vance wasn’t picked as Donald Trump’s running mate because he can deliver Ohio. It’s already in the tank for the GOP. And he wasn’t tapped because he’s the most qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. The entirety of his government experience consists of less than two years in the Senate.

Vance’s ascension is owed to something else entirely. He is the embodiment — and one of the most articulate defenders — of a belief system that has gradually taken hold of the Republican Party, one that prizes cultural and ideological warfare and rewards the warriors who are most effective in taking the fight to non-believers.

National politics has always been the destination for the smartest, most skilled and ambitious partisans. But the conflict itself was rarely the point, just a means to an end, and even the vice presidential nominees expected to do the campaign bladework were typically required to have some semblance of governing experience.

By historic standards, Vance has shockingly little. No experience balancing a state budget, overseeing disaster response, or wrestling with the legal and moral dimensions of the death penalty. He hasn’t commanded a state National Guard or managed a federal agency or Cabinet office. He’s less than a third into his first six-year Senate term.

Intellectual abilities aside, he hasn’t been anywhere long enough to develop a record that suggests he’s prepared to run the country. His conversion on Trump alone demonstrates he’s a work in progress, still developing new incarnations of himself.

Vance has less experience in elected office than other vice presidential nominees who were pilloried over their qualifications — most notably Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, Dan Quayle in 1988 and Sarah Palin, twenty years later. Not that long ago, it would have been a handicap that would have been a consistent and all-consuming topic of debate.

But the forces that delivered a third consecutive nomination to Trump also inexorably led to Vance as his running mate. To a party that has always viewed government as a constraint on liberty, it made perfect sense in 2016 to nominate Trump, a businessman with no prior experience in government. Whatever chaos Trump might have unleashed in the Oval Office as a result, once that hurdle had been met, it wasn’t much of a leap for a populist party with a disdain for establishment norms to settle on a vice president with just 18 months of experience in the Senate.

Vance has experience where it counts for the Trump era GOP, in the social media trenches and on cable TV hits. His Marine Corps service — Vance is the first post-9/11 veteran on a major-party ticket — insulates him on foreign policy, and offers a measure of credibility to isolationist views that once might have been dismissed as a product of a lack of seasoning.

He projects cool anger, and knows the enemy as well as anyone in the party because he’s lived and circulated among them, as a venture capitalist, a celebrated author and a Yale Law School graduate. He doesn’t deliver his home state so much as send a message to the restive regions that the GOP aspires to keep in its fold — the Rust Belt and Appalachia.

Trump spoke to these aspects of Vance’s background in announcing his pick Monday on social media, ticking off LinkedIn bullet points that individually served as dog whistles to the faithful.

It’s an about face for a party that once whacked Democratic presidents like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton for their naivete when it came to Washington and their on-the-job learning. And it’s a dramatic departure from recent veep nominees like Dick Cheney and Paul Ryan, both Washington heavyweights, and former Vice President Mike Pence, a former governor and six-term member of the House.

But that’s precisely the intention. As a 39-year-old with considerably less experience than Dan Quayle — who had several House terms and a full Senate term under his belt when he was tapped to be George H.W. Bush’s vice president — Vance’s rapid rise mirrors the GOP’s ideological realignment. He is Trump’s declaration of independence from the old Republican Party, a tacit rejection of what the GOP once valued at home and abroad.

Yet Vance’s ascent isn’t merely a function of Trump’s assault on elites and credentialism. He arrives at the end of an era dating back to 1960, when Richard Nixon campaigned on the slogan, “Experience Counts,” which was designed to highlight his background as House member, senator and two-term vice president against then junior Sen. John F. Kennedy. By 2008, a septuagenarian John McCain was prepared to hand over the keys to the White House to Palin, who was hammered for a thin resume consisting of a mayoral stint and two years as Alaska governor.

Experience, however, is no longer viewed as a badge of seriousness in either party, but especially among Republicans. Trump’s own 2016 victory came against an unusually deep and accomplished field of GOP governors and senators. He mercilessly turned their years of service in government against them all, painting them as denizens of the Washington swamp that he promised to drain.

Television cameras captured the prevailing sentiment up close at the Republican National Convention on Monday. As Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — the longest-serving Senate Republican leader in the history of the nation and godfather of the Kentucky Republican Party — stood at a microphone on the floor to nominate Trump, he was met with a resounding chorus of boos. In the midst of the awkward scene, all he could do was offer a pained smile and a thumbs up.

This article first appeared in POLITICO Nightly.