It’s not clear a running mate has the ability to sway lots of voters, but Trump’s pick of Ohio Sen. JD Vance raises questions about the role of women leaders in the Republican Party.
This story was originally published on The 19th.
Former President Donald Trump on Monday announced he had selected Sen. JD Vance of Ohio to be his running mate, rounding out the Republican presidential ticket with a second white man as the party stares down a significant disadvantage with women voters and voters of color, and in an election with reproductive rights front and center.
Trump announced his choice of Vance in a social media post, saying Vance was “best suited to assume the position of vice president.” Vance, who was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022 after a memoir on his family’s history in Appalachia became a bestseller, is expected to address Republicans during the party’s national convention in Milwaukee on Wednesday.
Vance, a political newcomer, is a staunch defender of Trump and has strongly backed conservative policies to restrict abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, as well as blocked Democrat-led efforts on gun control and environmental protections. He has also criticized Democrats who do not have children, arguing that they are deficient political leaders.
Trump’s struggles to recapture the white suburban women voters who helped him to victory in 2016 for months fueled speculation—and urging from some in his inner circle—that he would choose a Republican woman as his potential vice president. Ultimately, Trump’s list of finalists did not include any Republican women, and Monday’s announcement made clear that if the party is interested in boosting support among women voters, Trump wouldn’t do so by elevating one of its women leaders.
It might not have made a big difference anyway. Political observers who spoke to The 19th say that such a pick would be less of a factor than the party’s position on reproductive rights, a civil verdict last year that found Trump liable for sexual assault and the former president’s long history of disparaging comments about women. At the same time, Trump’s choice calls into question the role of women leaders within the new Republican Party, as reshaped by the former president and his allies.
“Having a woman wouldn’t bring him any kind of electoral advantage. It’s not going to help him win suburban women. That is not going to happen,” said Christine Matthews, a longtime Republican pollster who studies women and swing voters.
Matthews said that the Republican women leaders who were once thought to be in contention for Trump’s VP pick would not have appealed to voters who reject the party’s stance on abortion rights and that the selection of a woman running mate would not “take the stink off” Trump’s personal behavior toward women. More than a dozen women have accused Trump of sexual assault or harassment.
Several polls going back to January, when Trump’s nomination became all but assured, showed Biden having a significant advantage with women voters overall—that is, a slight advantage with white women voters and a wider edge with Black women and Latinas. A July poll of likely voters from The New York Times and Siena College taken after Biden’s stumbling debate performance, found the president had an eight-point advantage with women voters overall, a slight increase from the pre-debate poll.
However, The Times/Siena poll found Trump’s advantage with men had grown to 23 points.
An analysis of the 2016 election by the Pew Research Center found that Trump’s win then was fueled in part by a two-point advantage among white women voters, who made up 41 percent of the electorate.
“There is a big gender gap, and the formula for Trump’s success is to win men by more than he loses women,” said Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic pollster. Lake said that with such a deficit, opting for a woman running mate might have prompted some women voters who are not paying much attention to the presidential race to give Trump a second look. But any benefit would likely be limited to the days surrounding the running mate announcement.
On the other hand, if voters perceive Vance as an “alpha male,” Trump’s disadvantage with women voters concerned about “division, divisiveness and autocratic tendencies” could worsen, Lake said. “People don’t associate those traits as much with women leaders.”
She added that Trump’s decision to choose a man as his running mate would be viewed in a different light given his record on reproductive issues, including taking credit for the end of Roe v. Wade and the federal right to abortion, and denigrating comments about women.
“It’ll reinforce a lot of the conversation about him and women,” she said. It could bolster Democrats’ core message that a second Trump presidency would further chip away at women’s rights, Lake said.
There is a big gender gap, and the formula for Trump’s success is to win men by more than he loses women.
Celinda Lake
Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, brought to the ticket a profile aligned with one of the Republican Party’s core constituencies: evangelical Christians. He is not on the ticket this year after an unsuccessful bid for the Republican presidential nomination and is less popular with the party after failing to help Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election. When insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, witnesses say that some in the crowd could be heard chanting, “Hang Mike Pence.”
This time, as Trump neared the end of his search for a running mate, multiple news outlets reported that he was giving little consideration to top Republican women leaders and that his search had narrowed on a group of mostly men. Among seven Republican leaders who were reportedly sent vetting materials by the campaign, there was only one woman, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York.
That stood in stark contrast to the many lists of high-profile Republican women who had captured the attention of Trump’s inner orbit. Trump himself said last year that he liked the “concept” of having a woman on the ticket.
Those women included South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem; Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama; Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders; Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia; and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who challenged Trump for the presidential nomination and made history while doing so. All are slated to speak at the RNC this week.
Noem, who had appeared to fall out of contention as she grappled with criticism over her new book, which included an anecdote about her shooting a dog, insisted in recent weeks that undecided women voters were looking for a conservative woman as top messenger. In a June CNN appearance, Noem said that many Republican women “haven’t made up their minds because they want to have a woman talking to them about the issues they care about” and that many of them “want to know that their perspective is going to be at the table.”
Amanda Hunter, executive director at the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, a nonpartisan group that studies the election of women to public office, said that while women sometimes have a messaging advantage over men politicians on the issue of abortion, undecided women voters are not likely to support a woman leader they don’t match with ideologically.
Hunter said that one looming question is how Vance will approach running against Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump himself does not shy away from attacking his political opponents, often in inflammatory terms, but it’s unclear whether voters want that approach from his running mate.
“Plenty of men have attacked the vice president, but I don’t know that many women voters are going to have an appetite for personal attacks at this moment,” Hunter said, arguing that a more vicious attack role in contrast with Pence’s more restrained stance could turn off some undecided women voters.
Lake said Harris’ strategy—to lead on issues like reproductive rights and try to strengthen support among Democrats’ base of voters of color—will likely remain unchanged following Trump’s announcement. But, because of Trump and Biden’s ages, voters may give these picks a closer look than in previous elections.
“The vice presidents in both tickets may get a little more weight than they’ve gotten in the past because a lot of voters don’t think either one of these candidates is going to survive a four-year term,” Lake said. “They think that the vice president is more important, and they’ll definitely be looking at their credentials.”
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