Vice President JD Vance is positioning himself as President Donald Trump‘s successor, but early posturing comes with political disadvantages more than three years before the first 2028 Republican presidential primary votes are cast.
Vance, the first millennial vice president, underscored his appeal among younger Republicans this week during the first Turning Point USA college tour event since the assassination of the group’s founder, Charlie Kirk, alongside Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk.
At one point during the event at the University of Mississippi, students started chanting, “48,” the number of the next president.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, ladies and gentlemen,” Vance quipped in response.
However, the TPUSA event also underscored the political disadvantages of becoming an early presidential contender in what would be a long campaign, such as attracting unwanted attention, scrutiny, and criticism, like Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani did in 2008. Other examples include Howard Dean in 2004, Jerry Brown in 1992, Jesse Jackson in 1988, Hubert Humphrey in 1976, and Edmund Muskie in 1972.
To that end, Vance responded to criticism on Friday regarding comments he made during the TPUSA event, in which he hoped Hindu-raised second lady Usha Vance would be “moved” by the “same thing” that moved him in church when he converted to Catholicism in 2019. Critics have condemned Vance’s comments as “Hindu-phobia,” among other denunciations.
“My wife – as I said at the TPUSA – is the most amazing blessing I have in my life,” Vance wrote on social media. “She is not a Christian and has no plans to convert, but like many people in an interfaith marriage – or any interfaith relationship – I hope she may one day see things as I do.”
The TPUSA controversy presents an early test for Vance, whose popularity among younger Republicans, particularly young Republican men, started last year during his presidential campaign with Trump, thanks to his appearances on manosphere podcasts by the likes of Joe Rogan and Theo Von, and has been perpetuated by his online presence.
“Happy Halloween,” Vance also wrote Friday, alongside an edited photo of himself with the caption, “Can you hear the screaming.”
Vance’s broader MAGA credentials were also burnished by his White House Oval Office confrontation in February with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in part, because Zelensky did not say “thank you” to Trump and the vice president. A few weeks before that, Vance’s address to the Munich Security Conference was received positively by the MAGA base.
“There is a new sheriff in town,” he told Europe at the time.
However, the TPUSA event controversy will likely not be Vance’s last test after Trump this week conceded that he is constitutionally prevented, under the 22nd Amendment, from seeking a third term as president.
If he does run in 2028, Vance will have to differentiate himself from Trump while serving as his vice president, as he tries to prove to Republican primary voters that he could and should be president, despite being a relatively new political figure who was only elected to the Senate from Ohio in 2022. Prior to that, the Iraq War Marine Corps veteran and Yale Law School graduate was a corporate lawyer, Senate aide, and venture capitalist before publishing his bestselling, Netflix-adapted memoir Hillbilly Elegy in 2016.
Regardless, Reagan biographer Craig Shirley expressed confidence that Vance will become Trump’s successor because of his MAGA bona fides. Vance has simultaneously helped himself by serving as the Republican National Committee’s financial chairman, providing himself with unprecedented access to GOP donors.
“The GOP is now nearly all MAGA, and as long as Vance sticks to those principles and is loyal to Trump, he will be a frontrunner three years from now. He should have Trump’s blessing,” Shirley told the Washington Examiner. “He has also inherited the mantle of Charlie Kirk, and that gives him the pole position.”
Trump in February declined to describe Vance as his successor, contending it was “too early” before the 2028 Republican presidential primary, although he also said Vance is “very capable.”
However, five months later, Trump admitted Vance is “most likely” the “heir apparent to MAGA.”
“In all fairness, he’s the vice president,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “I think Marco is also somebody that maybe would get together with JD in some form,” he added of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose presidential aspirations are well-documented after he ran for president in 2016.
Trump has repeatedly pitched Vance and Rubio as a possible 2028 Republican presidential ticket, including this week in reaction to reporter questions regarding whether he was “trolling” Democrats with his “Trump 2028” messaging, complete with MAGA-esque baseball caps.
“We have JD. Marco is great,” Trump said on Air Force One, standing in front of Rubio. “If they formed a group, it would be unstoppable.”
Trump’s support of Rubio is interesting because the former senator’s personal foreign policy has historically been more hawkish or neocon compared to MAGA’s “America First” priorities.
At the same time, Trump and Rubio have developed a close working relationship. For example, Trump appointed Rubio in May to become his national security adviser after Mike Waltz’s demotion following his addition of an editor to a Signal group chat regarding U.S. strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen. It is the first time a White House aide has held Rubio’s two positions since Henry Kissinger in 1975.
“Clearly his two roles, State and NSC, give him a unique position, and equally clearly he seems in full control of State,” Elliott Abrams, a former President George W. Bush deputy national security adviser and Trump special representative for Iran and Venezuela, told the Washington Examiner.
More than three years before 2028 Republican primary voters cast their first ballots in Iowa’s caucuses, New Hampshire Republican strategist Tom Rath, whose more centrist state hosts the first-in-the-nation primary election, reported that a Vance “presence” in New Hampshire is “below negligible.”
“I suspect Trump is not allowing anyone to think about a post-Trump world for a while longer, at least,” Rath told the Washington Examiner. “My sense is that whenever the decision is made to allow conversation about a post-Trump world, Vance will have to compete here as will any others. At this point, any serious activity by any other Rs than Trump is not to be tolerated by Trump folks.
He continued, “There are folks here who were supportive of Rubio when he did run, and I would expect those folks will not concede anything to Vance at this point.”
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Meanwhile, for fellow Republican strategist Duf Sundheim, “almost every election for close to 20 years has been about change.”
“That yearning on the part of the public currently outweighs any plans any individual politician may have,” Sundheim told the Washington Examiner. “Second, events are much stronger than any strategic political plan… Trump, Vance, and Rubio each have their plan, and their plans will change based on powerful forces such as those above.”