Vance heads west as his vice presidential campaign tries to find its footing

LAS VEGAS — Donald Trump’s big bet on Sen. J.D. Vance faces a big test in the West this week, starting Tuesday afternoon, nearly 15 miles from the Las Vegas Strip.

Vance, the Ohio Republican who endured a difficult campaign as Trump’s running mate, will kick off the campaign with a speech at a high school in Henderson.

From there, Vance will head to an event in Reno and then to California on Wednesday for a fundraising lunch near Fresno. Later that day, Vance will meet at Arizona Christian University near Phoenix. Other stops could be added to the already packed schedule.

For Vance, it’s an opportunity to quickly move beyond a debut that was engulfed by renewed scrutiny last week over his previous provocative comments, including his thoughts on the social value of women who don’t have children — “hot women without children”, in his words.

These and other early observations, many of which a broad national audience is learning about for the first time, have served as a rough introduction that Vice President Kamala Harris, the de facto Democratic presidential candidate, has been eager to explore. Harris and her allies are rushing to define Vance as “weird” before the Trump team can define him on their own terms. Some of Vance’s fellow Republicans and leaders on the party’s right flank have expressed concern.

“Typically, after the convention, your choice for vice president is to go across the country, introduce yourself… and try to win over undecided voters,” Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist and former Trump State Department appointee, told NBC News. “Right now, JD Vance is trying to clean up his mess and win over the Republican Party. It’s a very strange dynamic.

“I think that’s the challenge now – reassuring the Republican Party that they were the right choice before they even try to expand the voter base,” Bartlett added.

A source close to the Trump campaign expressed optimism that the worst was over for Vance and that the turnaround really began late last week. The source specifically pointed to Vance’s speech Saturday in St. Cloud, Minnesota, at a joint rally with Trump. Video clips of his attacks on Harris circulated heavily among influential right-wing figures on social media. The speech as a whole was seen as a text telegraphing Vance’s role on the stump.

“He is Kamala Harris’s political attack dog,” added this person, who requested anonymity to share internal thoughts. “That’s essentially the game plan for JD moving forward.”

Vance’s performance in St. Cloud was noticeably more disciplined and on-script than the one he delivered earlier in the week at his first solo campaign event as Trump’s running mate.

At that rally, Vance deflected about his love for Diet Mountain Dew.

“I’m sure they’ll call it racist too,” he said offhand, in a joke that reached the friendly audience in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, but drew ridicule from Democratic corners.

On Saturday, Vance kept his comments more aimed at Harris, whom he described as the “most extreme liberal” when she was in the Senate before Vance was elected. (GovTrack.us, which tracks federal legislation, recently withdrew its 2019 rating of Harris as the most liberal senator, judging her second to Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in 2019 and 2020.)

“She co-sponsored the Green New Scam,” Vance said, referring to the Green New Deal climate legislation that Harris and other Democratic senators co-sponsored in 2019. “And she supports all the insane environmental policies that will drive out workers business Americans, drive the price of gasoline sky high and drive Americans deeper into poverty. It is 100% responsible for the inflationary disaster that is destroying American families.”

Vance also linked Harris to President Joe Biden, who supported her after deciding last week not to seek re-election. He emphasized that Harris has been asked to lead the administration’s efforts to address the causes of migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

“As America’s border czar — and she was the border czar, every media outlet said so — Kamala Harris is directly responsible for the worst border crisis in this nation’s history,” Vance said.

Meanwhile, he and his allies began to fight against the “strange” attack.

“’JD Vance is weird’” Vance posted Sunday on X at the top of a video clip of Harris introducing herself at a CNN town hall during her last presidential campaign with her pronouns: she, her and hers.

Ben Shapiro, the right-wing commentator who on your podcast days before said he doubted Trump would choose Vance if he could go back in time two weeks, he was back in the group.

“Democrats and Republicans are using two different definitions of ‘weird’ to attack the opposing candidate,” Shapiro posted on X. “Democrats say JD Vance is strange because he is concerned about declining birth rates as a social issue. Republicans say Kamala Harris is weird because she’s, you know, weird.”

Trump also came to Vance’s defense. In a Monday interview with Fox News, he accused Democrats of “spinning things differently” when they called attention to Vance’s “childless hot women” crack in 2021. At the time, Vance was running for Senate and chose Harris – a stepmother of two – and other Democrats because they do not have children.

“Well, first of all, he has tremendous support…among a certain group of people. People who like families,” Trump said. “He’s not against anything, but he loves his family. It’s very important to him.”