I harbored a personal affinity towards a Mike Huckabee nod for vice president. In expressing that preference, I also wrote that J.D. Vance would be a great choice, but I was risk-averse to putting his Ohio U.S. Senate seat in...
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I harbored a personal affinity towards a Mike Huckabee nod for vice president. In expressing that preference, I also wrote that J.D. Vance would be a great choice, but I was risk-averse to putting his Ohio U.S. Senate seat in play. President Trump now has chosen Vance, and I am all in. Here is my further thinking:
I despise political hypocrisy. If I deemed Vance flawed, I could not shamelessly turn around the next day and deny what I just said. My template for the Despicable Hypocrite in Politics is Kamala Harris. She stood in front of a nation at a debate among Democrats for their party’s 2020 presidential nomination and told all of America that Joe Biden is a racist. Then, as soon as her own candidacy drops like an Acme Company anvil in a Looney Tunes cartoon, she turns around and proclaims Joe Biden a great civil rights hero, adding that she is thrilled to be on his ticket as his Veep. Can there be anyone more phony? G-d knows that Dr. Jill Biden Ed.D. never has forgotten that blasphemy against her husband, a man who says he sat in jail for civil rights, marched for civil rights, participated in lunch counter sit-ins for civil rights, and got arrested in Soweto, South Africa for Nelson Mandela and civil rights. All of Biden’s claims are obviously documented lies. The only true thing Kamala ever said in public was that comment she made during that debate that Biden has been a lifelong racist. So her thrill to be with civil rights hero Biden is rank political hypocrisy and mendacity. As he himself might say to Kamala, “If you think I am a civil rights hero, you ain’t black.”
When word spread that President Trump had chosen J.D. Vance, the Ohio senator’s outstanding qualities and resumé stood out: he graduated college in only two years and with summa cum laude (the highest academic distinction); then he graduated from Yale Law School, the institution that, along with Harvard, has become the incubator of almost all Supreme Court justices in the past two generations. He was an editor of the Yale Law Review, which both Yale and Harvard call the “law journal.” Beyond his stellar academic credentials, he served as a United States Marine. (READ MORE: Advice To Trump: Fire The Secret Service)
Compare his intelligence to that of Kamala Harris. (Oh, for goodness sake, stop laughing, and pay attention.) For that matter, compare him to the Big Guy, who graduated 76th in a class of 85. What do they call graduating in the bottom 10 percent of the class — Dumma Cum Laude? And neither served in the military. Among Biden’s hurricane of lies, he told Naval graduates that he received an appointment to serve in the Navy. It was a lie. He never did.
Several angles amplify why Vance is an excellent vice presidential choice, despite my concern over putting a safe U.S. Senate seat into future play. First, for the short term, a U.S. Senate vacancy gets filled by the state’s governor. Republican Mike DeWine is more conservative than John Kasich was, although not a real MAGA Republican. But he is good, and he has created a political foundation that has helped turn Ohio from a bellwether swing state into a pretty solid Republican state. That is quite a thing, given that light-blueish Pennsylvania borders on the east, and deeper blue Michigan up north. On the other hand, increasingly red Indiana and Kentucky border Ohio’s west and south respectively. Hence, the historic bellwether. At least for the immediate term, then, the Vance seat will be safely Republican.
Sometimes the newly named successor U.S. senator gains a following and the benefits of incumbency when that seat’s term expires. For example, we have seen that success with Tim Scott (South Carolina), Alex Padilla (California), and Kirsten Gillibrand (New York), all of whom leveraged their new incumbency to get reelected on their own. In other cases, the new incumbent proves unable to hold on when seeking election on his or her own. Think of Republicans Kelly Loeffler (Georgia), Martha McSally (Arizona), and Charles Goodell (New York). (READ MORE: The Ballot and the Bullet Against Trump)
So there is that. Whatever will be will be.
But there is another subtle angle here. Presently, the Democrats have 51 Senate seats, and the Republicans have 49. Joe Manchin has always voted Democrat, despite posturing as an independent. If he truly were independent, Ketanji never would have made it across the finish line. Bernie Sanders is independent only in the sense that he lines up more comfortably with Communists than with Democrats. The bottom line is that the Republicans need to turn two seats to gain an outright U.S. Senate majority or, if Trump and Vance are elected, at least one to create a tie that Vance can regularly break.
It seems quite likely that West Virginia will turn. Several other Democrat seats would seem to be in play for Republicans, too, but commonsense does always win the day. For example, Montana is red, but Jon Tester keeps managing to raise enough money from outside Montana to con the local yokels and keeps holding his seat. Hopefully, they finally will have caught on by now. With a razor-thin 51-seat Democrat edge, the entire Biden agenda — open borders, Afghanistan fiasco, baby formula shortages, crime waves, prices through the roof, unaffordable housing, and so much more—— happened only because Tester always voted with Biden. Are Montanans smart enough to figure this out, finally? The notion that they opt for Trump over Biden by a million percentage points and then tie him up from achieving his agenda by sending Tester, too? We’ll see.
Other seats may be in play. Larry Hogan, the fabulously popular former governor of Maryland, may have a real chance to flip the seat being vacated by Ben Cardin in Maryland. If Hogan is contra-MAGA, so be it; whatever it takes to turn the seat. Arizona may be in play, though the Democrats have flipped the state’s population. Same with Nevada. But, really, besides West Virginia, who knows? Will New Jersey come into play as Bob Menendez gets forced out by his own party and then vindictively runs a third-party line to split that vote? How much has Glenn Youngkin changed Virginia? Are Pennsylvania’s and Michigan’s seats honestly in play? Doubtful — unless a real GOP landslide occurs, which is possible as Biden recedes and Kamala Kackles. (READ MORE: The Lies of the Biden Presidency Are a Problem)
The fascinating one is Sherrod Brown’s seat in Ohio. So many regard Ohio as having moved “safely” into the Republican column. As discussed above, maybe. And yet, just as Tester keeps bamboozling the Montana voters, deeming his constituency as real rubes, Brown seems to do so in Ohio. And that is where the Vance selection is most intriguing. J.D. Vance is the other senator from Ohio, deeply popular in the state, comparatively recently elected. With him campaigning as President Trump’s running mate, can his presence help pull extra Ohio votes away from Sherrod Brown? That would make Vance’s selection one heck of a genius move by President Trump.
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