Turns out, Donald Trump’s choice of running mate was based on desperation.
Former President Donald Trump has a serious problem with white men: They don’t want to vote for him. At least, not the way they did in 2016.
To plug the hole in Trump’s boat, the former president brought in Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, intending to “leave him in Pennsylvania” and secure blue-collar workers across the Rust Belt—namely, white men. Trump’s advisers believe that Vance could help keep white male voters on board, according to The Washington Post.
Trump’s problem with white guys is nothing new. In April, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey found that the demographics that historically supported Trump have begun to shift and the groundswell of support from white male voters that Trump had experienced in 2016 was dissipating.
But by 2020, it seemed that argument had already started to lose ground among white voters across the educational spectrum, who began to defect to Joe Biden’s camp. While Trump still came out on top in securing white male voters, the difference between their turnout in 2016 and 2020 was the nail in the coffin of his reelection bid.
Things only got worse from there. According to NPR, between 2020 and 2024, Biden saw a 24-point bump among white men with college degrees, a group that has historically backed Republicans.
In an effort to reclaim these voters, Trump tapped Vance to be his running mate, as someone who could theoretically appeal to both college-educated and non–college educated white men, touting his widely popularized white working-class roots alongside his degree from Yale Law School.
“You need a white guy to get the white guys we lost. The Hillbilly Elegy guy is the one to do it,” MAGA political operative Vish Burra told The Bulwark. “Trump needs Vance because he’s good on camera and he sounds right. He’s not one of these people you can dismiss as a MAGAloid or a barbarian.”
So far, it’s not totally clear that Vance is up for the task of white guy retrieval.
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