Do Blogging and Running For Office Mix?
JD Vance: harbinger or outlier?
This past week JD Vance decided to visit Holt’s Sweet Shop in Valdosta, Georgia for some donuts as part of his campaigning. It did not go very well:
Three things about that video:
Vance had one go-to line to interact with civilians: “How long have you been here?” He had no follow-up questions, and displayed no ability to make small talk. That’s fine: I’m sure putting other people feel at ease is not an important skill for the vice president of the United States or anything;
Vance could not even order donuts without seeming weird; and
I will confess to feeling the slightest twinge of sympathy for Vance when said he was running for VP and the employee’s response was “OK.” That “okay” had the same tone as someone uses when talking to a dude who wants to brag about their podcast.
The contrast with Tim Walz’s subsequent visit to a Runza in Nebraska was noticeable enough for MSNBC’s Alex Wagner to run a whole segment about the contrast between the vice presidential campaign styles. As Wagner noted: “Normal does not appear to be in JD Vance’s wheelhouse.”
Vance’s supremely awkward demeanor on the campaign trail serves as a reminder that he underperformed in his Ohio Senate victory compared to other Republicans in the state in 2022. It is also of a piece with the constant stream of stories about Vance’s offensive ramblings on podcasts and his willingness to DM extreme far-right folks on social media. Little wonder that Vance is now the worst-polling vice presidential nominee in this century.
Vance’s long trail of embarrassing statements also serve as a reminder that he is the first millennial to be on a national ticket. As the Washington Post’s Tatum Hunter notes, “Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance is the first millennial, born between 1981 and 1996, to run on a presidential ticket. Last week, he experienced a millennial’s worst nightmare: Somebody found his public Venmo, old blog and tagged Facebook photos.”
In sharp contrast to Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, or Tim Walz, Vance came of age in the online era. He has a digital paper trail that reporters and opposition researchers can pore over at their leisure.
For Politico’s Derek Robertson, Vance’s stumblings and fumblings are a warning for others who suffer from being Terminally Online and interested in ideas: do not think about vaulting onto the political stage:
His supporters blame the media. His critics blame his hardcore social conservatism. But a better explanation lies farther back in Vance’s past, when he didn’t just hold a different set of political beliefs, but a different identity entirely: He used to be a blogger.
In the early 2010s, the then-incoming Yale Law student JD Hamel (his former adopted name) penned a handful of brief, mostly undistinguished political op-eds for FrumForum, a blog hosted by former George W. Bush speechwriter and current Never Trumper David Frum. His posts tackle typical, almost quaint Obama-era Republican fare: Jon Huntsman vs. Mitt Romney (he preferred Huntsman); Grover Norquist and ethanol subsidies (Norquist was a “fiscal phony”); Paul Ryan’s proposed austerity budget (the left will “overreact”).
To be candid, the content of the blogs themselves is not very interesting. But the mind on display in them — and still to this day, in Vance’s bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and various op-eds and essays — is one that clearly relishes political ideas in their own right. As Trump’s running mate, however, Vance has entered a political arena where the main weapons are popularity, style and charisma — not proving his political-philosophical chops. His awkwardness on the trail so far illustrates that his approach to politics, honed in the world of elite colleges and intellectual cliques, doesn’t really translate to the national stage….
Vance has become a liability on the presidential ticket not for his inconsistency — hardly an issue in a GOP where fealty to Trump is the overriding virtue — or even for the specific opinions he used to blog about, but for the ideological way he sees politics, which is directly at odds with the often grubby and compromise-filled endeavor of trying to persuade voters and win an election. Any blogger with a sense of intellectual pride is bent on seeking out, and persuading others of, political truths, no matter how arcane or even downright unpopular they may be. Candidates, on the other hand, are supposed to sell people on an inspiring political message, avoiding issues that could turn off voters. One job is about being right; the other is about winning.
“Trying to be an interesting writer and trying to be an effective politician are somewhat antithetical,” said Matthew Yglesias, the Vox co-founder who launched his blogging career in the early days of the Iraq War.
As an O.G. poli sci blogger with zero interest in ever running for political office, I should agree with Yglesias and Robertson. And yet matters do not seem as simple as they suggest.
Say what you will about Vance, but he has already gotten father in politics than most elected officials. He certainly has gotten farther than more traditional media figures who tried to enter the political arena. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof couldn’t even get his name on the ballot when he tried to run for governor in Oregon. Furthermore, I had to laugh at the notion that individuals “honed in the world of elite colleges and intellectual cliques” are likely to flail at electoral politics. I seem to recall that a fair number of elected officials — including many populists — attended Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
The real question to ask is whether being good at blogging means one is bad at politics and campaigning. Yglesias makes a fair point: a good blogger is someone who should be well-informed but spiky in their opinions. That does not always translate well into attracting interest group support or managing a campaign infrastructure or, you know, persuading voters.
In part, however, this depends on where the blogger is trying to enter politics. Some ruby-red districts like flamethrowing candidates, like Marjorie Taylor Greene; some deep blue districts likely feel the same. In an age in which both Democrats and Republicans are polarizing, an awful lot of voters are not interested in broad-based appeals. It would therefore not surprise me if, a decade from now, the more obstreperous members of Congress started out with a Substack.
The bigger question is whether someone can run for national office with a track record as a blogger. The problem with such a background is not a combative intellectual style — it is owning a digital paper trail that could be strip-mined for attack ads. As someone who has blogged for more than twenty years, I accepted long ago that not only could I never run for office — there is no way I could ever be nominated to a Senate-confirmable position.
Younger bloggers, however, with aspirations for political office would likely be able to make such a transition. In the foreign policy world, plenty of academics have participated vigorously in the battle of ideas and then serve as political appointees. Plenty of elected officials, from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Barack Obama to — shudder — Josh Hawley view themselves as politicians who truck, barter, and exchange in political ideas.
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World thinks it is a mistake to generalize from JD Vance to bloggers in general. Vance is an outlier on several dimensions, and was not even a successful blogger. Extrapolating from his unique weirdness to other bloggers seems like a generalization too far.
Some day there will be a politician who started as a blogger and then commands a national audience. That it won’t be JD Vance says way more about the author of Hillbilly Elegy than those who choose to blog.
I think the point about Vance isn't that he's a one-time blogger, but that he's an intellectual. Never mind the "elite college" stuff; most Yalies aren't intellectuals. Vance, though, is one, and an intellectual of a specific type: a bright kid from a provincial background suddenly finding himself having to make his way in a much more cosmopolitan milieu, and reacting strongly against it. He's a romantic antimodernist, which accounts for much of his fascination with Tolkien, who was also a romantic antimodernist. There were lots of them in the early twentieth century, and they made great prophets--but the trajectory of their ideas could take them to very dark places. I've spent a lot of time in southern intellectual circles, and have encountered this type a lot (at one time in my life, this type was *me*). Yes, he's managed to go far in politics despite that--but weirdos and conmen can go far in today's Republican Party just on Trump's endorsement, so I don't think that counts for much.
"The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World thinks it is a mistake to generalize from JD Vance to bloggers in general. Vance is an outlier on several dimensions, and was not even a successful blogger. "
You buried the lede.