When JD Vance appeared on a prominent podcast last week, the vice president had an opportunity to pitch his message for the midterms. It didn’t go especially well.
Asked what he’d tell voters who are disappointed by what has transpired since early last year, the Ohio Republican said, “Give us another chance, or give us another couple of years, to continue to work on the amazing things that we’ve been doing for the past two years.”
The phrasing was widely and swiftly panned — Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii called it “the most mind-boggling midterm pitch I’ve ever heard in my life” — and we’re unlikely to hear the vice president repeat those exact words again. But the underlying message hasn’t gone away. Bloomberg News reported on Vance’s latest campaign speech.
Vice President JD Vance urged North Carolina voters to give Republicans more time to accomplish their agenda as the GOP is on the defensive in key states ahead of November’s midterm election.
Vance traveled to the battleground state on Monday in a bid to shore up support for Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley, who polls show trailing Democratic former Governor Roy Cooper. The contest has morphed into an opportunity for Democrats to flip a crucial seat.
“There is more work to do, of course, and it will take more time,” he said.
Vance isn’t the only one pushing this line. On Tuesday morning, Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters appeared on Fox Business and said of his party, “We need more time right now.”
The inherent defensiveness is tough to miss: A political party that’s riding high and expecting to do well in upcoming elections tends not to beg the electorate for more time.
For that matter, let’s not overlook that Vance and the RNC chair are pushing a line that’s largely the opposite of what Donald Trump is telling Americans: To hear the president tell it, the United States has entered a utopian “golden age” in which everything is already effectively perfect. There’s a rather dramatic gap between this and “we need more time.”
It also doesn’t help that voters were specifically told throughout the 2024 campaign that they wouldn’t have to be patient — because Trump was going to start delivering national perfection “on Day 1.” More than 600 days later, those promises have conveniently disappeared down an Orwellian memory hole.
But perhaps most important of all is how fundamentally unpersuasive Vance’s and Gruters’ pitch is with six weeks remaining in the election cycle. These Republican leaders’ message is rooted in the idea that if voters just stick with the status quo for a while longer, failures will somehow transform into triumphs.
Why? Well, just because.
Except that this is impossible to take seriously, in part because repeating the same mistakes tends not to produce success, and in part because Republicans aren’t even pretending to have meaningful ideas or solutions they intend to pursue in 2027 or 2028.
A Politico report from two weeks ago noted, “Republicans used their midterm convention … to ask voters to preserve their congressional majorities and let them ‘finish the job.’ But with few consensus legislative goals, it’s far from clear what job they want to finish.”
Vance and his GOP allies have no policy agenda to speak of. The governing cupboard is bare. Republicans want power, but they haven’t even tried to tell voters what they intend to do if they hold onto that power.
If the vice president seriously expects the electorate to reward the GOP with “more time,” he should take this opportunity to explain why Republicans misused the time they were already given and what would be different after the midterms.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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