Panicking Trump Picked J.D. Vance After Slip With Key Voter Group

Former President Donald Trump has a serious problem with white men: They don’t want to vote for him. At least, not the way they did in 2016.

To plug the hole in Trump’s boat, the former president brought in Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, intending to “leave him in Pennsylvania” and secure blue-collar workers across the Rust Belt—namely, white men. Trump’s advisers believe that Vance could help keep white male voters on board, according to The Washington Post.

Trump’s problem with white guys is nothing new. In April, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey found that the demographics that historically supported Trump have begun to shift and the groundswell of support from white male voters that Trump had experienced in 2016 was dissipating.

In 2016, Trump was able to fire up his white men without college degrees by focusing his campaign rhetoric on immigration and white grievance, or the idea that white people are the victims of discrimination, ideas that remain key among Republican voters, according to NPR.

But by 2020, it seemed that argument had already started to lose ground among white voters across the educational spectrum, who began to defect to Joe Biden’s camp. While Trump still came out on top in securing white male voters, the difference between their turnout in 2016 and 2020 was the nail in the coffin of his reelection bid.

Things only got worse from there. According to NPR, between 2020 and 2024, Biden saw a 24-point bump among white men with college degrees, a group that has historically backed Republicans.

Trump has begun to experience a slip in swing states, as well. Polling from late 2023 and early 2024 in Wisconsin, a key battleground state, showed that Trump’s net favorability rating among white men had dropped 22 points, from plus eight points to minus 14 points. Trump saw major slips with self-identified Republicans, rural men, and white men who did not attend college, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. These groups have a sizable overlap and make up a crucial part of Trump’s base.

In an effort to reclaim these voters, Trump tapped Vance to be his running mate, as someone who could theoretically appeal to both college-educated and non–college educated white men, touting his widely popularized white working-class roots alongside his degree from Yale Law School.

“You need a white guy to get the white guys we lost. The Hillbilly Elegy guy is the one to do it,” MAGA political operative Vish Burra told The Bulwark. “Trump needs Vance because he’s good on camera and he sounds right. He’s not one of these people you can dismiss as a MAGAloid or a barbarian.”

So far, it’s not totally clear that Vance is up for the task of white guy retrieval.

While there was plenty of initial excitement over Vance’s selection, a YouGov poll taken the week his nomination was announced found that Vance was viewed “very” favorably by only 18 percent of male respondents and “very” unfavorably by 28 percent. The results were identical among white respondents.

The same poll found that male respondents and white respondents were about evenly split in supporting versus disapproving of Trump picking Vance.

CNN analyst Harry Enten reported last week that Vance averaged a net favorability of negative six points across all polls, a number that was far lower than any other vice presidential nominee in history, including former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.