I get where you’re coming from, but I think you’re underestimating how much of the right-wing electorate responds to aesthetics and performance, even if they don’t particularly like the person doing the performing. You’re right. Vance isn’t some magnetic figure with a deep bond to working-class voters, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t useful to the right’s project, or that he doesn’t know how to imitate the language of alienation well enough to be effective.
He’s not beloved, but he’s legible. When he rails against elites, even if he is one, he’s performing a script that a slice of disaffected voters, especially white men who feel culturally displaced, recognize. It doesn’t matter that he’s full of it. It matters that he speaks in the idiom of resentment and cultural grievance, which travels farther than people think.
Put differently: he doesn’t need to be loved. He just needs to be “one of us” in the way he talks and who he targets, even if it’s all theater. That’s enough to get people to shrug and go, “eh, close enough.” And in a low-trust, post-truth political culture, “close enough” often wins.
If Trump isn’t the nominee in 2028, who stands to tap into that emotional connection? Will they do it better than Newsom or whoever else the Democratic nominee is? I thinks that’s the terrain we’re playing on. Interested in hearing who others think can bridge both authenticity and substance.
