Voters Don’t Know Much About Vance, But They Dislike Many of His Past Statements

New polling indicates that, the more voters learn about J.D. Vance, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s choice for vice president, the less likely they are to support him.

A Data for Progress poll conducted July 17-18 — days after Vance was announced as Trump’s running-mate — found that 3 in 10 voters said they hadn’t heard enough about the GOP senator from Ohio to form an opinion on him. The remainder of respondents were split in their opinions on Vance, with 35 percent saying they viewed him favorably and 35 percent saying they had an unfavorable opinion.

Although he’s a member of the U.S. Senate, Vance is a relative unknown even among voters of his own political party. But voters tend to sour on him quickly when presented with more information about his past statements.

The Data for Progress poll also asked voters to agree or disagree with a number of statements Vance has made in the past. Voters, for example, were asked whether they agreed with Vance’s statement declaring that the elimination of abortion “is first and foremost about protecting the unborn,” with only 39 percent agreeing with that idea and 53 percent disagreeing.

Vance is vehemently against abortion rights, although he tried his best to conceal his record from the public during his Republican National Convention speech last week.

“The [2020] election was stolen from Trump,” Vance once errantly claimed. Only 34 percent of voters — mostly conservatives and mostly Republican — agreed with that statement, with 56 percent disagreeing.

Respondents in the poll also disagreed with Vance’s false and xenophobic claim that the Biden administration was trying to “punish people” for not voting for the current president by opening up the border for migrants to easily pass through. Nearly 6 in 10 voters (58 percent) disagreed with that statement.

Voters also disagreed with Vance’s comment in defense of Trump’s stated goal of firing any government employee who is disloyal to him should he win the election later this year. “Trump should… fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” Vance has said — 60 percent of respondents disagreed with this statement, the poll found.

Attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now the presumptive nominee for Democrats in the 2024 presidential race, were also rejected by voters. Vance described Harris years ago in disparaging terms due to her being childless, describing her as a “cat lady” who is “miserable.”

When asked if they backed Vance’s declaration that the country is being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives” and who “want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” only 30 percent of voters agreed with Vance while 56 percent disagreed, the poll showed.

The Data for Progress poll is consistent with other surveys showing that many voters are still unsure about the GOP vice presidential nominee due to his lack of household name recognition. An Economist/YouGov poll, for instance — some of which was conducted before Vance was selected for the ticket — found that one in two voters (48 percent) said they didn’t know enough about him to say whether they had a favorable view. Among those who believed they did know enough, 31 percent said they had an unfavorable view while only 22 percent said they had a favorable one.

Vance and the Trump campaign are likely aware that his views will not help them politically — during his Wednesday night acceptance speech last week at the Republican National Convention, Vance didn’t discuss any of his far right beliefs on reproductive rights, even though he has said in the past that he supports a total national abortion ban. He also softened his Christian nationalist rhetoric, portraying himself as a mere Christian in support of religious liberty rather than a lawmaker who thinks that his religious beliefs should be codified.