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Unsurprisingly, Vance is viewed positively by non-college whites (+9 percentage points), rural voters (+13 percentage points), and white evangelicals (+37 percentage points). This was the trade-off Trump made in selecting Vance: Before Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, Trump was certain he would win in a landslide, so he chose a running mate who would energize his base with little concern about his lack of appeal to voters outside of his base. This hubris is a key weakness of MAGA, and it encouraged the selection of Vance and appears to have led to a serious mistake.
This trade-off is not should is necessary. After Republican Glenn Youngkin won the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race on a platform propaganda-speaking as “parental rights,” some right-leaning thinkers began dreaming that strategically packaged right-wing populist anti-woke politics could gain significant traction among constituencies outside the core MAGA coalition. Vance should be the next big success for this project.
In fact, Vance-style right-wing populism should help consolidate a new Republican and center-right coalition. As Brian Beutler describes in detail in a good articleIn this narrative, the Democratic Party has been taken over by woke leftism, disdain for the “traditional” family, and radical ideas about immigration and crime. This has created an opening for right-wing populism, which has unabashedly defended draconian immigration restrictions on communitarian and nationalist grounds, and has used radical government policies to promote large “traditional” families and privilege them over less “traditional” ones. Add to that the abandonment of the standard pro-rich, anti-worker agenda of the Republican Party, and you have a winning formula—or so the theory goes.
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