JD Vance has gradually become a prominent figure in Republican politics, but before becoming vice president, the Ohioan’s electoral record featured just a single victory — which was decidedly underwhelming.

In 2022, Vance won a Senate race in Ohio by 6 points, underperforming every other statewide Republican on the ballot by a large margin. As a Washington Post analysis later noted, “Ohio went strongly for Republicans; it did not go strongly for Vance.”

The year after Vance arrived on Capitol Hill, Donald Trump chose him for the GOP ticket, and just two years after his unimpressive win in Ohio, the Republican became one of the youngest and least experienced vice presidents in American history.

Soon after Election Day 2024, with weeks remaining before Inauguration Day, Trump gave him a difficult job. It fell to the vice president-elect to escort Matt Gaetz around Capitol Hill as part of an effort to generate support for the scandal-plagued Republican congressman’s nomination for attorney general.

Predictably, Vance failed. Even GOP senators aligned with Trump couldn’t be persuaded to back Gaetz, and the incoming president both abandoned his nominee and left his vice president with weakened credibility.

That failure was a sign of things to come.

Indeed, the events of December 2024 came to mind this week as Vance suffered back-to-back embarrassments. The vice president led a U.S. delegation in Pakistan for talks with Iran, which ended in failure due in part to the instructions he received from Trump; and less than a day later, the world learned of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán’s landslide defeat, despite Vance having campaigned on his behalf.

These were arguably two of the most important tasks the vice president has been assigned while in office, and both ended in failure. They were not, however, his only humiliations:

• Vance reportedly advised Trump not to launch the war in Iran. He was ignored.
• Vance tried to lead a diplomatic effort in Greenland last year, which was met with a swift and unsubtle backlash.
• Vance tried to boost Germany’s right-wing party AfD in the country’s 2025 elections, and those efforts fell short, too.
• Throughout his tenure, Vance has been publicly contradicted by Trump on everything from pardons to the deployment of federal troops to U.S. cities to immigration policy.

The vice president, in other words, isn’t exactly racking up victories.

At a recent White House event, Trump asked Vance to comment on negotiations with Iran. When the vice president said the process was “going good,” the president quickly followed up, asking whether the efforts would resolve the war. Vance hedged and said he’d brief Trump later.

“So if it doesn’t happen, I’m blaming JD Vance,” the president concluded. “If it does happen, I’m taking full credit.”

Soon after, Dana Milbank wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times, “Does Mr. Vance still not realize that the joke is on him? The interesting thing is not that he keeps debasing himself but that he gets less and less in return each time. As his political fortunes dim, his soul has become a depreciating asset.”

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