The Kentucky governor is doing exactly what a vice presidential pick is supposed to. Kamala Harris is surely watching.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear speaks during an interview at the Kentucky State Capitol in Frankfort, Kentucky, on Monday, July 22, 2024.(Timothy D. Easley / AP)
There is a good case to be made that the best way to defeat Donald Trump and J.D. Vance is to simply let Vance keep talking. The Republican vice presidential nominee has a way of expressing himself that could charitably be defined as “cringeworthy.”
Consider the recently resurfaced 2021 interview Vance did with Tucker Carlson, in which the man who is now Trump’s running mate expressed his view that the problem facing America is elected leaders who have not given birth—including the woman who is now the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party: Vice President Kamala Harris.
“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” Vance argued. “It’s just a basic fact: You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people that don’t have a direct stake in it.”
That statement was wrong, and offensive, on so many levels that it would take the rest of the 2024 campaign to fully unpack it. But now that Harris has replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, she needs to pick a deputy of her own. And that Democratic nominee for vice president will have to be prepared to counter Vance in what will probably be a 90-minute debate—or, hopefully, many 90-minute debates.
The question of who will take that debate stage with Vance is a live one, and it will matter. One of the stand-out moments of the 2020 campaign was Harris’s shredding of Vice President Mike Pence in a debate where the former district attorney and state attorney general aggressively prosecuted Pence for his many failures as the bumbling and bizarrely disengaged chair of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. It was precisely the sort of boost a vice presidential running-mate is supposed to provide for the ticket, and Harris did the job brilliantly.
This year, the list of prospects for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination is long. By most measures, it includes Governors Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and Tim Walz of Minnesota, as well as Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona—all of whom are reportedly being vetted by the Harris campaign. I’d like to think that the list could be expanded to include some additional contenders—such as former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, who has emerged as a vital progressive voice in his native Texas and nationally; such as United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, whose blunt fury with Trump and the billionaire class would play well in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania; and such as Michigan US Representative Debbie Dingell, a savvy strategist and able campaigner who would help in a battleground state and who shares former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s skill for getting things together on Capitol Hill.
And, of course, the list should include Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who is aching to debate Vance. “Listen, J.D. Vance is a phony,” says Beshear. “He’s fake.”
Beshear makes that argument for all the usual reasons that serious observers do when discussing Vance’s wildly cynical journey from Trump critic to Trump running mate. Recalling Vance’s 2016 fretting about the prospect that Trump might become “America’s Hitler,” Beshear said on CNN Monday, “I mean, he first says that Donald Trump is like Hitler, and now he’s acting like he’s Lincoln.”
But Beshear adds a regional twist that really gets under the skin of Vance, a Yale Law School–educated millionaire who made his name nationally by writing the 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which highlighted his family ties to Kentucky and rural Appalachia.
Vance acknowledges that his actual hometown—before he moved to California and became a high-flying venture capitalist—was Middletown, Ohio, a historic industrial city with a population of more than 50,000. But he plays the Kentucky card hard when telling his story, and that doesn’t sit well with Beshear.
After Vance joked at a rally on Monday about how he drinks diet Mountain Dew and suggested that Democrats who call him a racist for doing so, Beshear took the Republican apart.
“What was weird was him joking about racism today and then talking about diet Mountain Dew. Who drinks diet Mountain Dew?” said Beshear.
“But in all seriousness, he ain’t from here. He is not from Kentucky. This is a guy who would come maybe in the summers for some period of time, or to weddings or funerals.
“And then he claims to be from eastern Kentucky, writes a book about it to profit off our people. And then he calls us lazy. This especially makes me angry about our people in eastern Kentucky. These are the hard-working coal miners who powered the industrial revolution. He calls them lazy and acts like he understands our culture and he’s one of us. He’s not. This is a guy who went out to Silicon Valley and trying to be an Every Man. He ain’t one of us.”
That freaked out the Trump-Vance campaign, which announced, “Unlike Beshear, who rode his father’s coat tails into the governor’s mansion, Senator Vance has had to earn everything he’s accomplished in this life.” Then Vance claimed Beshear “inherited the governorship from his father.”
That’s an interesting claim coming from Vance, a wealthy and ambitious politician who, as CBS News reported, “assiduously courted billionaires and Silicon Valley titans to bankroll his unlikely rise from bestselling memoirist of despair, drugs and generational poverty in Appalachia to a ticket that could seat him a heartbeat away from the presidency.” One of those billionaires, Peter Thiel, donated $15 million to Vance’s 2022 bid for the Ohio Senate seat he now holds.
It’s true that Beshear is the son of a former Kentucky governor, but he wasn’t gifted his job on a silver platter. His father, Steve Beshear, served from 2007 to 2015. He left the post and a Republican won it, which came as no surprise in Kentucky, where Republicans have won the vast majority of state posts in recent elections. But Andy Beshear won it back with a 2019 campaign in which he ousted the Republican incumbent. Vance plays fast and loose with the facts, just as he shifts a lot of his positions—even about his scandal-plagued running mate, Donald Trump. “The problem with J.D. Vance,” Beshear told CNN, “is he has no conviction, but I guess his running mate has 34.”
John NicholsTwitterJohn Nichols is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation. He has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on topics ranging from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyses of US and global media systems. His latest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Times bestseller It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.