The MAGA Version of Pete Buttigieg

If you show up to a J. D. Vance campaign event and ask some of the red-hat-wearing attendees whether they’re fans of the senator from Ohio, they will say: No, they are fans of Donald Trump.

Yet Vance is better than his ticketmate at one important job: He can squeeze Trumpism through his own post-liberal-populist tube and produce something that looks like a coherent ideology. Whereas Democrats are fond of mocking Vance for being socially awkward, Trump’s supporters see him as their very own Pete Buttigieg: a man with a theory of the case who is eager to defend it both on television and in real life. He is the sharp TV-sound-bite counterweight to Trump’s rambling rally speech.

“There is this Christian idea that you owe the strongest duty to your family, and then you owe the next duty to your community, and then to your country, and then to everybody else,” Vance said at a Christian-revival event on Saturday in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, in response to a question about his approach to immigration policy. “It doesn’t mean that you have to be mean to other people, but it means that your first duty as the American leader is to the people of your own country.”

Trump’s supporters will tell you that they appreciate this ability to articulate their values. Maybe they didn’t like Vance at first, but now they believe that he is smart. He brings a wholesome substance to their movement, like a bowl of leafy greens before the red-meat entrée. “He balances Trump out,” Diane Ernest, a retiree from Southampton, Pennsylvania, told me at a Vance event on Saturday in Bucks County. “He’s a good speaker, and he doesn’t run off—just gets right to the facts.”

“In the beginning, I wondered why Trump picked Vance,” 77-year-old Carol Cavanaugh told me at the same event. But she gets it now. Unlike Trump, “Vance keeps his composure,” she said. She’s proud that Trump “went out of his comfort zone and didn’t pick someone just like him.” For voters like these, the symbiotic relationship makes the two men stronger.

Among MAGA voters, no real equivalence exists between the two men. On the trail, Trump gets Beatlemania; Vance receives polite applause. Retail politics requires a level of regular-guy-ness that Vance does not appear to possess. (Exhibit A: his painful interaction with a worker at a Georgia doughnut shop.) This is partly because Vance is not, strictly speaking, a regular guy: Vance is a Yale grad turned venture capitalist with a reputation for ruthless ambition. He also comes off as far more cerebral, and more conservative, than his running mate. He and his intellectual allies view America as being in a state of “civilizational crisis,” and employ phrases like “postmenopausal females” and “replacement fertility rate” in everyday parlance. He once wrote a 7,000-word essay about his conversion to Catholicism in which he quotes theologians and philosophers at length.

Every Vance event follows roughly the same trajectory. He’ll start with a few jabs at Kamala Harris and her reluctance to do media interviews. Then, once the crowd has been worked into a mild froth, Vance will turn to inflation, gas prices, and housing. He will suggest that the solution to these problems involves more energy and more deportations. He’ll say, “Drill, baby, drill!” and everyone will clap. Then he’ll declare that it’s time to send the “illegal aliens” home, and people will clap even harder. To wrap up, he’ll take a handful of questions from the media.

The stump speech does contain a few moments of cringe. When Vance talks about the price of eggs, for example, he likes to replay a bit about his three kids, who love eggs. In Traverse City, Michigan: “My kids eat a lotta eggs!” In Monroeville: “A lotta eggs in my family!”

But the awkward moments seem not to stick with Trump’s base. What matters to them, these supporters say, is how Vance eloquently articulates their positions—and makes them feel righteous for holding them. Harris, Vance often tells his audience, believes that the people complaining about illegal immigration in places like Springfield, Ohio, are racist. “Kamala Harris, stop telling the people of your own country that they’re bad people!” he said on Saturday, to cheers. “You’re a bad person for not doing your job!”

Vance’s biggest strength, though, may be his eagerness and ability to engage with the media. He will announce, at the end of each rally, that it’s time for a few questions from reporters, and every head in the audience will swivel to gawk at the press pen. They will boo and jeer at each question, regardless of its content, and Vance will smile at them like a proud parent, dispelling the tension with something ostensibly magnanimous: “This is America, folks! She has a right to ask the question, and you have a right to tell her how you feel about it.”

Vance seems most at ease in these moments, because he has shifted the focus away from his personality and back toward his well-studied message. He, like most lawyers, is comfortable with debate and confrontation, turning the media’s questions into opportunities to get back to the issues: inflation and immigration. He will not lose the thread as Trump does, when he gets lost in his own stories about Hannibal Lecter and electric boats. Vance will answer the question, or at least provide an elegant-sounding nonanswer. Asked in August if he and Trump would support raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour, Vance made a quick pivot: “Whether you have a higher minimum wage or a lower minimum wage, the way to destroy the wages of American workers is to import 20 million illegal aliens and let them stay here with work visas,” he said.

His willingness to do this sets him apart from Harris, who has mostly refused to grant interviews. Vance’s supporters recognize this. “He’s good unscripted, which a lot of people in this race aren’t,” Milo Morris, an opera singer at the Bucks County event, told me.

Vance has been a political shape-shifter, changing his views on politics, Trump, and even the lessons of his own 2016 book. But that slipperiness is easy for MAGA supporters to ignore when he’s applying a gloss of coherence to their movement. If Vance performs well in tonight’s debate with Harris’s vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz, it will be because he has what Trump voters see as talents. A debate isn’t a doughnut-shop photo op or a glad-handing line-walk requiring baby-kissing and charm. A debate is a contest of ideas—something that Vance has spent his whole life preparing for.