Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. And neither is the selection of J.D. Vance as its vice presidential candidate. (Dem oppo folks are doing well.)
Alexander Nazaryan at The Daily Beast:
J.D. Vance has thoughts and opinions—and being a millennial, many of those thoughts and opinions are recorded online, where they live in perpetuity.
That wouldn’t be a problem, normally, except the 39-year-old junior senator from Ohio is the Republican nominee for vice president. He is also turning out to be a gift to Democratic opposition researchers from Santa Monica to Brooklyn.
On both substance and style, Vance is increasingly looking like a debacle. He could be the first vice presidential nominee since Sarah Palin, John McCain’s disastrous running mate in 2008, to actively harm the ticket.
In a 2021 conversation at Pacifica Christian, a private high school, Vance criticized the Sexual Revolution for “making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear,” going so far as to seemingly suggest that women should remain in abusive marriages for the sake of keeping the family intact.
It’s right there online. Has been this whole time. But only now is it making his GOP colleagues squirm. Republicans on Capitol Hill—where the self-important Vance has lost friends (if he ever made them)—are calling him Trump’s “worst choice” possible. There’s even speculation Trump could dump Vance.
Martin Pengelly at The Guardian:
Questions continued to mount about the political transformation of Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, after the release of emails from a former friend in which Vance called Trump a “morally reprehensible human being” and said: “I hate the police.”
The messages between Vance and Sofia Nelson, who sent them to the New York Times, were largely dated between 2014 and 2017. In one, Vance sent Nelson a section of Hillbilly Elegy, his bestseller about his Appalachian boyhood.
“Here’s an excerpt from my book. I send this to you not just to brag, but because I’m sure if you read it you’ll notice reference to ‘an extremely progressive lesbian’,” Vance wrote.NEW: In 2021 Vance sent out fundraising emails that called Democrats “childless sociopaths” and in a podcast in 2020 said childless Americans, especially in leadership, are “more sociopathic” and make the country “less mentally stable.” https://t.co/SeEcAddnDa
— Andy Kaczynski (@KFILE) July 30, 2024
JD Vance claims his July 2021 comment to Tucker Carlson that "childless cat ladies" like Kamala Harris “don't really have a direct stake” in the country’s future was taken out of context.
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) July 30, 2024
I found him making similar comments in three more Fox interviews. https://t.co/1r8IGmUI4H
Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men:
For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the park path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood stream. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us.
That is what all of us historical researchers believe.
And we love truth.”
