Vance is better off securing the Republican mantle while it’s available to him.
I agree with Phil and Dan: JD Vance will run for president in 2028, and he’ll do so while dragging the Trump administration’s baggage along with him. But Phil has a point about the uphill climb to which Vance will consign himself, his aides, and his family.
Campaigning for the White House is grueling enough even in the years in which the political winds are at your party’s back. Even if the president’s moribund job approval rating improves over the next several months, the historical record suggests that general election voters will be in the mood for a change two years from now. Vance would be unable to make a clean break from Trump, erecting additional hurdles along his already fraught pathway to the White House. Better to wait until 2032, Phil contends, when “Vance would be able to run as his own man and stake out his own vision for the country in a way that would be much harder for him to do now, as VP under Trump.”
But why would we have any confidence that Vance is, first, capable of making himself over in ways that appeal not just to Republican primary voters but the general electorate? We’re talking about winning the presidency, after all, not just the nomination. Second, how do we know that he would retain the GOP’s affections through that process?
If the past is prologue, the president’s political standing among Republicans should wane as his political utility diminishes. He and his most cherished policies are deeply unpopular with all but the most committed Republicans. But the 2026 primary cycle has shown that Trump retains his mesmeric hold over the party’s base.
Trump’s policy preferences – popular or otherwise – receive little scrutiny from those voters. They are Trump’s desiderata, and that’s all that matters. In a theoretical future in which Vance has spent three years divorcing himself from the Trump policies with which he disagrees, and presuming the president is still around to take issue with his former vice president’s revisionism, why would we presume that a critical mass of Republican primary voters will reward that?
Phil’s theory depends on the notion that there is a vast well of untapped longing for retrenchment abroad and statism at home. That’s possible, but it’s just as possible that the GOP has spent the last decade deferring to Trump by virtue of his force of personality – a trait Vance lacks. Additionally, given his previous personality makeovers, it’s prudent to be skeptical of the appeal a Vance running “as his own man” would have to the persuadable voters in the center of the electorate who make or break a campaign.
And those are just the variables over which Vance has some measure of control. History marches on. Vance can count on Republican voters’ support today, but that can change. Hundreds of unforeseeable but formative events are likely to reshape the political landscape between 2028 and 2032. And posterity is littered with unrealized political careers of once towering figures who missed their moment, some of whom have a better reputation within their respective political tribes than others.
In 1992, Mario Cuomo opted out of what promised to be a brutal intra-party fight with household names like Tom Harkin, Paul Tsongas, and the dark-horse upstart from Arkansas, Bill Clinton. Rather than being remembered as an also-ran, he spent his winter years watching his son succeed him in New York’s governor’s mansion while attending the occasional ceremony to honor his legacy. Colin Powell begged off repeated attempts to draft him into presidential politics, and he remade himself a maverick political gadfly in retirement. Chris Christie also rejected entreaties to run in 2012, the obvious apex of his boomlet. He spent the remainder of his career in politics, flitting from one political personality to another, alienating what was his core constituency in the process.
Each of them had their own moment, passed on it, and never recovered the standing they once enjoyed. Some wanted the presidency more than others, which should probably be the foremost factor in determining whether to run. Waiting to become more seasoned in office, or sitting out a contest in hopes that a more favorable political environment will emerge down the line, however, risks failing to take full advantage of unique and irreplicable historical circumstances. There are no guarantees that some talented fresh face will emerge from the wings to capture voters’ hearts.
Nor is winning the nomination and losing the presidency a guaranteed pathway to political irrelevance. For every William Jennings Bryan and Adlai Stevenson, there’s a Richard Nixon or a Ronald Reagan. Vance is better off securing the Republican mantle while it’s available to him. He can figure out what to do with it later.