Vice President JD Vance is the Republican National Committee’s finance chairman, a regular on the campaign trail, and the face of the administration’s anti-fraud initiative, but none of those are his biggest job.
Vance drew perhaps the most difficult assignment at the Republican midterm convention, a role he has repeatedly played since taking office and will be called upon to reprise again in 2028. He served as President Donald Trump’s emissary to voters who supported their ticket in 2024 but are disenchanted with at least some of what the administration has done in this second term.
These are the types of voters the midterm convention was intended to reach, Trump supporters who are reluctant to turn out for other Republican candidates when the president isn’t on the ballot and the lower-propensity young men who made all the difference two years ago but may be having second thoughts now.
“The people on the margins, the people who are still a little unsure who they’re gonna vote for,” Vance said in his Dallas keynote address late last week. “So people who love some of our policies, but maybe don’t agree with others.”
To speak to these voters, Vance invoked the slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk on the anniversary of his brutal, on-camera murder.
“Charlie, ladies and gentlemen, was dedicated to this movement and this country,” Vance said. “He loved, and I do mean loved the president of the United States. But in the eight months or so that we were in office before Charlie died, I talked to him a lot, almost every day. And Charlie was still a free thinker with his own principles and views.”
Vance channeled Kirk to implicitly recognize supporters who view the Trump administration’s military action in Iran as a violation of its promise to avoid new endless wars.
“He did not always agree with us,” the vice president said of Kirk. “Let me just give you one example. Charlie hated war. Whether it was Europe or Africa, the Middle East, he didn’t care. He just hated war.”
The allusion to Kirk’s foreign policy views comes amid reports that Vance was not enthusiastic about the Iran war himself, although he has been a loyal defender of the president since it began.
“But what I’m asking you to do is do what Charlie did. Do not throw the baby out with the bath water,” Vance said. “Don’t — don’t give the country over to a bunch of crazy people because you happen to disagree with us on a policy issue here or there.”
Vance didn’t hold back in defending Trump on both conservative and populist grounds. “We’ve ended taxes on Social Security. We’ve ended taxes on tips, and we’ve ended taxes on overtime,” he said. “We have banned corporate tycoons from buying up our housing stock because we hold the simple belief that American homes ought to go to the American people. And this is my favorite: Under the leadership of the president and Bobby Kennedy, we did what generations of Democrat politicians promised but failed to do. We actually took on Big Pharma and lowered drug costs for all of our citizens.”
In Vance’s telling, Trump’s is “not just the first government in the last 80 years to actually stop a border invasion. It’s the first in the last 80 years to reverse the border invasion.” He cited data showing illegal immigrants returning home and the foreign-born population dropping.
Vance was quick on his feet when a protester waving a Mexican flag interrupted his speech: “Well, well, my friend, if you love Mexico so much, get your a** over there, I’ll buy you the plane ticket.” He ridiculed top Democratic Senate candidates Abdul el Sayed of Michigan and James Talarico of Texas.
“I’m here to tell you, this is who the Democrats are now, my friends,” Vance said. “They’re not just the party of [a] little higher taxes, maybe some dumb regulations. They’re not the party of FDR or JFK. Hell, they’re not even the party of Bill Clinton anymore. The Democrats are the party of hatred.”
But walking the careful tightrope of remaining a steadfast Trump loyalist while speaking to voters who find the second term wanting despite not being left-wing Democrats might be Vance’s main task in this election, even as he serves as the RNC’s main money man.
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It could also be his main calling in the next one.
“We gotta take care of business this November,” Vance told the Republicans gathered in Dallas, “then we’ll worry about what comes next.”