JD Vance ‘reeks of inauthenticity,’ Republican strategist says

Ohio senator previously suggested Donald Trump could be ‘America’s Hitler,’ and later sought the former president’s endorsement during his 2022 Senate race

Swing voters aren't buying what Senator JD Vance is selling, according to a Republican strategist.

Sarah Longwell is director of Republican Voters Against Trump — a group of conservatives who do not support former President Donald Trump. She said she has spoken to swing voters and that their overwhelming response to Vance is thinking he is a "phony."

“The thing that is killing JD Vance is that voters, and I have listened to tons of swing voters since he was picked, and they don’t like him at all, they think he seems like a phony,” she told MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki.

She said that swing voters are very aware of Vance's flip-flopping on Trump. In the past, Vance has described some of Trump's voter base as being racist, said he might consider voting for Hillary Clinton to stop Trump's ascendancy, and has called Trump a "fraud," a "moral disaster," a "cynical a**hole," a "bad man," and "America's Hitler."

“[Voters] also get … it’s like vibes, right? Voters can smell inauthenticity and that’s what JD Vance reeks of to them,” she said.

Many swing voters think JD Vance is a ‘phony,’ according to strategist Sarah Longwell (AP)

Vance flipped his feelings on Trump and MAGA right around 2022, when he was planning to run for Ohio's vacant Senate seat and needed the former president's endorsement.

But hypocrisy and flip-flopping are increasingly survivable in modern electoral politics. Democrats, including presumptive 2024 presidential candidate Kamala Harris, have been using another descriptor when discussing Vance: weird. Since July 23, Harris's campaign has called Trump and Vance "weird" in at least 14 posts.

“My attitude is, I’m just gonna be who I am. If they want to attack me for whatever they’re going to attack me on that’s fine. You just have to power through and do your thing,” Vance said on a podcast in late July.

For Vance, "doing his thing" apparently includes telling his seven-year-old son to "shut the hell up," suggesting that people with children are more invested in the nation and deserve more voting power than people without children, and dreaming up victim fantasies where his political opponents would decry diet Mountain Dew as "racist."

Vance has tried to undermine the "weird" allegations by dismissing them as juvenile bullying, unworthy of his response.

“My best guess — this is just a total guess — is that her campaign is run by a lot of 24-year-old social media interns who maybe were bullied in school and so now they’ve decided they’re going to do the same thing," Vance said during a podcast appearance. “They’re going to take that attitude of the middle school social scene and try to run a campaign on it… I just don’t think most Americans buy it or care.”

Regardless of the thoughts of "most Americans,” the attacks have apparently gotten under Vance and Trump's skins. The former president responded to the attacks with a very strategic "no, you are" response and insisted that he isn't weird.

“They’re the weird ones," Trump said during a podcast appearance. "Nobody’s ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not and I’m up front, and he’s not either, I will tell you, JD is not at all, they are.”

Vance being "weird" or a "phony" are subjective judgements about the man, but polling has also indicated that the Ohio senator is deeply unpopular with the American voters.

Trump's running mate has the lowest favorability rating of any VP pick immediately after the party convention since the 1980s, with a net negative favorability of -6 points, according to CNN. In recent years, the average for a VP nominee has been +18 points at this stage.