On Wednesday evening, Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance addressed a crowd of Republicans at his party’s national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, giving his first formal speech as the vice presidential nominee running alongside former President Donald Trump.
Noticeably — and perhaps strategically — absent from Vance’s speech at the convention was any mention of his anti-abortion and Christian nationalist views.
The evening was officially billed as being about foreign policy, but Vance, having just been nominated as Trump’s running-mate earlier this week, spoke on myriad issues. Many of his claims, mostly targeting the Biden administration, were misleading or blatantly false, while other statements tread a thin line.
At one point in his speech, Vance peddled the false, anti-immigrant talking point that undocumented people are driving up housing costs, prompting the RNC audience to erupt into chants of “send them back”; at another, he praised his spouse’s parents, who immigrated to the U.S. decades ago.
Vance then demanded that any “newcomers” in the U.S. conform to some undefined standard of Americanism. “When we allow newcomers into the American family, we allow them on our terms,” he said.
Vance also wrongly claimed that the Biden administration has led the U.S. away from being “energy independent.” In reality, oil production in the U.S. — which is rapidly accelerating the global climate crisis — has never been higher than under President Joe Biden.
On that same topic, Vance derided Biden for pushing for more green energy jobs in the future, calling the president’s plan to fund such jobs a “green new scam.” More than a quarter of a million green energy-related jobs have been created during Biden’s term in office so far.
In a short aside during his speech, Vance encouraged unsafe gun practices, celebrating how his grandmother stored loaded weapons in unlocked places throughout her home. (Notably, unintentional firearm fatality is a leading cause of death among children in the U.S.)
Vance also used his speech to rewrite history, claiming that Trump had opposed the war in Iraq while Biden had supported it. In fact, both Biden and Trump had openly stated their support for the war when it began, shifting their stance only after public opinion turned against the occupation years later.
Vance’s extremist stance on abortion was markedly absent from his speech, despite his repeated calls for a federal abortion ban when he was running for senator in 2022.
“I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” Vance said in a radio interview at the time, adding that he could understand the far right argument that such a ban was needed in order to deny residents of states with severe abortion restrictions the ability to cross state lines to obtain the procedure.
Like other Republicans — including Donald Trump — Vance appears to be strategically concealing his anti-abortion agenda because it is unpopular with the American public. Indeed, his website, where he once called for “eliminating abortion” completely, appears to have been wiped from the Internet as of Wednesday morning.
Overall, Vance’s speech played up his working-class childhood while ignoring his ties to billionaires like Peter Thiel, who has backed Vance financially for years in both the private sector and in his run for the Senate. Vance also tampered down his ordinarily over-the-top MAGA-esque rhetoric, and probably for good reason: Most of the U.S. public currently knows very little about him, and revealing the “real” J.D. Vance may give voters the impression that he is a carbon copy of Donald Trump.
Indeed, while recent polling shows that more voters have a negative view of the GOP vice presidential candidate than a positive one, a plurality of voters admit to knowing little about him. An Economist/YouGov poll published the same day Vance gave his speech found that only 24 percent of registered voters have a favorable view of him, while 35 percent see him in a negative light. Nearly half of voters (48 percent) said they didn’t know enough to form an opinion.
Vance’s speech largely succeeded in concealing who he is from the American public, political pundits noted.
“He put a very friendly face on a pretty disturbing agenda,” said CNN’s Van Jones.
“Vance is known for his fiery defenses of Trump on TV. He’s not really using this speech tonight to showcase that side of his political persona,” said The New York Times’s Jess Bidgood.
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