Former Republican pollster Sarah Longwell thinks that former President Donald Trump made life easier for Democrats when he picked Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) to be his running mate.
In an interview with The New Republic's Greg Sargent, Longwell argued that Vance's past harsh criticisms of Trump reveal that he is "clearly a hollow person of little conviction" now that he has done a complete 180 and embraced the former president.
However, she said that this hypocrisy likely won't stick with voters, many of whom have also undergone drastic opinion changes about the former president.
That said, she thinks Vance is vulnerable in the sense that he is "fanatical on abortion" to a degree that other prospective Republican running mates are not.
"I think Trump's been pretty clear-eyed about what a liability abortion is for Republicans," she said. "So to go grab somebody who has turned into a real zealot on abortion seems like a weird choice."
ALSO READ: Associated Press issues warning about iconic Trump assassination attempt photo
Longwell then revealed that she conducted a focus group with swing voters and they were uniformly creeped out by Vance as Trump's running mate.
"You can beat a Donald Trump-J.D. Vance ticket," she said. "A Donald Trump-J.D. Vance ticket is a very specific thing. It is doubling down on something that, really, less than a third of the country is for."
Turning back to abortion, she said that "J.D. Vance opened the door to being able to prosecute the case on abortion now in a way where I was thinking, 'Man it's going to be harder to prosecute this case against Trump.'"
She also thinks that Vance will give Democrats the opportunity to explain the dangers of Project 2025, as Vance has endorsed firing the administrative state en masse and replacing them with hardcore loyalists.
"It gets really scary really fast and J.D. Vance really leans into that part of it," she said of the project. "He's just got 'mini-fascist' written all over him."
