In 2024, while campaigning as Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance went viral for an awkward moment at a Florida donut shop when a worker appeared reluctant to strike up a conversation with him.

Two years later, a different scene played out at a bakery in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio.

“You want to come with us?” Vance said, huddled around a trio of employees taking selfies with him. “We’ve got room, right?” he continued, glancing over at his staff. “We don’t stop at traffic lights.”

A donut order had turned into an invitation to join him at a campaign-style rally nearby. Three women, still wearing their company-branded hats, waved from the backseat of a minivan in the vice president’s motorcade in a TikTok video posted to Vance’s account with a modest 72,000 views.

Maybe it was home turf, or better advance work by his team. Either way, Vance’s allies say the vice president, who has held elected office only since 2023, is growing into the public demands of politics.

Whether voters are noticing is less clear.

In a national Bowling Green State University/YouGov poll conducted from late August through early September, 53% of independents viewed Vance unfavorably and only 29% viewed him favorably. And in interviews with MS NOW, some Trump supporters sounded more excited about Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a 2028 contender.

It’s not for lack of trying. In recent months, Vance has been “firing on all cylinders” in an effort to connect with Americans, according to a person familiar with the matter. That effort includes informal social media videos, a media blitz, a faith-based book tour and a handful of retail stops. He’s also using a more tactful approach than his boss. He acknowledges voters’ economic pain, addresses criticism of the administration’s controversial policies and sits for interviews in venues Republicans usually avoid.

The push comes as Trump’s approval ratings sit at an all-time low, and the president regularly brushes off voters’ economic frustrations. For Vance, the midterms will double as a test of public sentiment heading into 2028, when polls show him as an early front-runner for the Republican nomination.

A Republican operative working on Senate campaigns, who requested anonymity to speak freely, said Vance’s challenge is that Trump’s “megaphone is just ten times larger than what Vance is saying or doing.”

“He’s got one of the toughest jobs in politics, often translating what the president is saying or doing,” the operative said. “I think he’s done that well. It’s not easy. It’s just a question of whether that connects with midterm voters.”

Robert Alexander, a political science professor who directed polling for the Bowling Green survey, said stalwart Republicans are “excited about JD Vance.” But “he doesn’t seem to be moving independents favorably.” In the survey, Trump fared even worse with independents but slightly better than Vance with Republicans.

Alexander said the average voter tends to think of internet “memes” when Vance comes to mind, such as jokes that he wears eyeliner, rather than any policy. That ambivalence came through in interviews with MS NOW. Many Trump supporters praised Vance, but several had warmer words for Rubio.

“He’s okay,” Lucie Thompson, a retired Ohio resident who voted for Trump, said of Vance, adding that she doesn’t “know much about” him.

“I think Rubio would be better,” she said, citing his experience.

Edward X. Young, a self-described die-hard Trump supporter who serves as a GOP committee member in Brick Township, Ocean County, New Jersey, referred to Rubio as “dynamic,” “charismatic” and having “more pizzazz” than Vance, though he bet the vice president would ultimately be the nominee. Another rallygoer, 73-year-old Bill Taylor, said “I like JD Vance” and plans to support him in 2028. At the same time, he said Rubio is “incredible” and “doing just a stellar job.”

Jack Dwyer, a 21-year-old college student, noted that Turning Point USA has already endorsed Vance, but he said, “I’ll say personally for me, I like Marco Rubio, and I like that he’s all over the place in a good way,” noting the multiple hats he has worn in the administration.

Some Vance skeptics say he’s disingenuous or use terms like “weird” to describe him in focus groups, according to Sarah Longwell, a political strategist and longtime critic of the president.

Mike Hartley, an Ohio Republican strategist who has followed Vance’s career over the last decade, pushed back on those characterizations.

“Aren’t we all awkward?” he said. “I’m dismissive of a lot of that because I just think: ‘Okay, find me a person who isn’t awkward in some regard.’”

‘Equally’ involved in outreach

While Trump is asking voters to “pretend” he’s on the ballot this November, Vance is picking up more responsibility as the party’s heir apparent. A GOP official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss campaign strategy, said that Vance “will be on the campaign trail just as much as the president.”

The party’s hope is that their travel will boost turnout amongst their supporters who wouldn’t otherwise show up, and both men are “equally as involved” in that effort, the official added. If Republicans lose badly in the midterms, and Vance decides to run in 2028, “you’ve got a future presidential candidate who owns a lot of this,” the GOP operative said.

“I’m very curious to see how he navigates post-election,” they added.

Trump and Vance are being dispatched on the campaign trail strategically to avoid locations where their presence may be hurtful to local candidates based on polling, according to the GOP official.

Vance has mostly spent time traveling to the Midwest this year, according to public records, a nod to his rise to public prominence as a writer offering a window into the grievances of working-class Americans. But even in his home state of Ohio, Vance’s favorability is underwater, although he’s more favorable than Trump or other prominent Ohio GOP lawmakers.

Asked whether Vance could leverage those higher marks to help downballot Republicans in the state, Alexander, the Ohio-based professor, said, “I don’t think people are talking about JD Vance at all.”

“I just don’t think he’s got a lot of juice, per se,” he said.

‘He’s out there’

Vance’s media circuit has included ABC’s “The View,” HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” and the popular self-help YouTube show “The Diary of a CEO,” in addition to the usual stops for Republican politicians on conservative networks. Vance also went on Joe Rogan’s top-ranked podcast, a venue that some credited with helping Trump win the 2024 presidential election.

A White House official previously told MS NOW that Rogan’s show could be a platform that the president returned to before the midterms, but only Vance’s appearance has materialized with just four weeks until Election Day. Rogan has notably grown critical of key Trump policies, including tariffs and his mass deportation campaign.

The hosts pressed Vance on the war with Iran, immigration and the Jeffrey Epstein files. Corbin Walters, a 21-year-old New Yorker who works in retail and attended Trump’s recent rally in New York, said he’s seen “a lot of clips” of Vance on social media, particularly from podcast interviews.

“He’s out there. I like that about him,” Walters said.

Matt Mowers, a Republican strategist and former Trump official who supports Vance, said Vance is a “smart, policy-driven person” and “long-form opportunities serve him well.”

He’s “willing to go to any corner” to bring the party’s message out and court skeptics, Mowers added.

“He’s not just focused on conservatives,” a person familiar with the matter said, “he really believes in [reaching] the country as a whole.”

Contentious engagements with media personalities could serve to bridge the gap for voters between Vance’s previously critical comments about Trump prior to his 2021 conversion into MAGA politics. It also lends itself to Vance’s Yale Law School background and debate skills.

“He has fun with them,” the person said, referring to nonfriendly media spaces.

“He really is playing to his strengths as kind of both the in-person and online brawler for the White House,” said Eric Wilson, who ran Marco Rubio’s digital strategy during his 2016 presidential campaign. “One of the big takeaways that we’ve seen in the last several years is that it really pays to be yourself and have your own personality, because the politicians that don’t embrace who they are, get detected pretty quickly.”

Vance, at 42, is nearly half of Trump’s age. He is known to be chronically online, frequently taking jabs against his critics on X, though he took a break from the platform earlier this year. In another recent TikTok video, Vance described why he believes Netflix’s rom-com series “Emily in Paris” is a “masterwork of American television,” calling the show a “massive cultural criticism of millennial decision-making.” It garnered some 430,000 views on the platform, as of Sunday, and more across other social-media websites.

The vice president’s embrace of the online clip-economy could have more staying power ahead of 2028.

“Those off-the-record stops are an artifice of the ’90s, early 2000s-style of campaign coverage that is sort of on the way out,” Wilson, the GOP digital strategist, predicted. “His ability to be able to go into these podcasts and produce these clip-able moments, and be able to post meme-worthy stuff is probably the better strength, and that’s what he’s leaning into.”

Mowers believes retail politics isn’t quite on its way out the door yet.

“Human connection is still what drives politics,” he said. “Whether people meet the candidate themselves, or they see the candidate meeting others; connecting on a human level with others; those are the ways in which they can connect with candidates.”

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From MS Now.