JD Vance appeared on a prominent podcast this week, and The New Republic described the live interview as “disastrous,” noting that the vice president “struggled to defend the Trump administration’s record on everything from the war in Iran to high rates of inflation.”

There was, however, one element of the appearance that stood out for me.

Pressed on his message to voters 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.”

So, a few things.

Right off the bat, it’s hard not to notice the disconnect between Vance’s message and Donald Trump’s message. To hear the president tell it, the United States has entered a utopian “golden age” in which everything is effectively perfect. There’s a rather dramatic gap between this and “give us another chance.”

What’s more, let’s also not forget that throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump assured Americans that he would start delivering national perfection “on Day 1.” Two years later, his vice president is nevertheless pleading for “another couple of years.”

As for Vance’s contention that the White House is doing “amazing things,” it was hard not to notice that he neglected to mention what any of those things might be.

For good measure, let’s also not brush past how pitiful it is to see a national Republican officeholder, expecting brutal results in the midterms, reduced to “give us another chance” with seven weeks remaining in the election cycle. This clearly is not the kind of message a leader delivers when things are going well. Indeed, Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii called it “the most mind-boggling midterm pitch I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Even if we put all of that aside, though, I found myself asking a related question. Let’s say Vance’s pitch works and the American electorate agrees in November to give Republicans “another chance” and “another couple of years.”

Then what? What exactly would GOP officials do in the next two years that they failed to do over the last two years?

More wars? More tariffs? More corruption? More Trump glorification? More partisan weaponization of the levers of federal power?

A Politico report last week 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 in 2027 and 2028 if they hold on to that power.

Late last year, the conservative editorial board of The Wall Street Journal admonished the “agenda-less GOP Congress,” adding that Republicans “don’t seem to have any priorities beyond populist stunts.” The editors asked rhetorically, “Is there something that Republicans would like to accomplish in the next vital year while they still control the House, Senate and White House?”

Nearly a year later, congressional Republicans not only failed to deliver results, but they largely gave up on working altogether, and no one seems to have any idea what the party might like to accomplish in the next Congress.

If the vice president seriously expects the electorate to give him and his party “another chance,” perhaps he should explain (a) what went wrong with the first chance; and (b) what might be different in the near future.

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