There is an old adage in politics, roughly translated from the language of hardball to plain English, that you don’t spend ammunition on a target that isn’t a threat. By that measure, the American left has just handed JD Vance the most sincere endorsement a political figure can receive: they are terrified of him, and they want you to hate him before you’ve had the chance to decide for yourself.
The coordinated campaign to define the Vice President is now fully underway, and its architects aren’t even bothering to disguise the strategy. Democrat operative Lis Smith — the same consultant who helped Pete Buttigieg transform himself from the mayor of South Bend into a national commodity — put the game plan on the table without apology: the left must begin defining Vance “not in 2027, not in 2028 — but today.”
That kind of candor is almost refreshing. It is also a tacit admission of something the polling has confirmed for months. At the 2026 CPAC straw poll, 53% of over 1,600 attendees selected Vance as their preferred presidential choice — the second consecutive year he has dominated the survey. CNN polling analyst Harry Enten wrote that Vance is “like Mario Andretti and the rest of the GOP is going around in go karts when it comes to 2028.” When the opposition party’s chief strategists announce that their most urgent task is to make voters distrust a man who hasn’t even declared a candidacy, they are not operating from a position of confidence.
The Character of the Attack
What is most revealing about the left’s opening salvos is not their ferocity, but their intellectual bankruptcy. Consider the contributions on offer. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear — a man whose political future depends on winning back the kind of working-class Appalachian voters who have found in Vance something that resembles their own story — called the Vice President “the most conceited politician I’ve ever heard.” This from a party that recently ran a candidate whose campaign apparatus dubbed her an icon before she’d finished a sentence in a press conference. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro accused Vance of being a “phony” who doesn’t care about all Americans. Representative Ro Khanna of California, speaking at Yale, compared Vance to Joseph Stalin. Stalin, one notes, governed by mass starvation and the Gulag. Vance serves as Vice President of a constitutional republic. The comparison doesn’t merely fail on the merits — it suggests a mind so untethered from proportion that the audience at Yale should have asked for a refund.
Then there is the entertainment wing of the operation. John Oliver dedicated a full thirty-minute segment to attacking the man, landing on the observation that Vance is “another abrasive MAGA a-hole with a load-bearing beard” — a line that apparently passes for insight on HBO. Jimmy Kimmel mocked Vance for being named by Iranian officials as a potentially more acceptable diplomatic interlocutor than other American figures, treating the suggestion that a Vice President of the United States might be taken seriously in foreign diplomacy as an occasion for ridicule. Set aside the irony that the left spent years demanding American officials be respected abroad; apparently that standard applies selectively.