It all started with a tweet about a couch. Within hours of Donald Trump announcing the Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate in the presidential race, a rather lurid accusation cropped up on social media.
The user of a since-deleted X account wrote last month, “can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).”
The fake page citation from Vance’s bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy lent credibility to what turned out to be a baseless claim, as detailed in a now-removed fact check from the Associated Press. Soon, the internet was awash in memes mocking Vance’s relationship with various pieces of furniture. “I did not have sectional relations,” one X user joked, paraphrasing Bill Clinton’s infamous quote about his extramarital affair. Another user added: “Who hasn’t been excited by the thrill of the chaise?”
Even Kamala Harris’s newly launched presidential campaign appeared to get in on the fun, tweeting: “JD Vance does not couch his hatred for women.”
The couch debacle only underscored Vance’s overall dismal introduction to the country after his somewhat forgettable speech at the Republican national convention last month, prompting some to wonder if Trump should make the historic decision to ditch his running mate just three months before election day. Vance enters the final 100-day stretch of the election season as one of the most unpopular running mates in recent history. According to a CNN analysis, Vance is the least liked non-incumbent vice-presidential nominee since 1980.
And the backlash goes deeper than couch memes. Critics have dug up his past comments supporting a nationwide abortion ban and attacking women without children. In a clip from 2021 that has circulated widely over the past two weeks, Vance told the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the US was managed by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too”.
That comment struck many Americans as so out of touch that it sparked censure from some surprising figures, including the generally apolitical celebrity Jennifer Aniston. “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day,” Aniston wrote in an Instagram post. “I hope she will not need to turn to [in vitro fertilization] as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”
The Harris campaign cast an even brighter spotlight on the controversy with a statement titled, Happy World IVF Day To Everyone Except JD Vance.
The turmoil has intensified questions over whether Trump might replace Vance as his running mate, a strategy that has not been pursued since 1972. One unnamed House Republican told the Hill last week: “I think if you were to ask many people around this building, 9 out of 10 on our side would say he’s the wrong pick … He’s the only person who can do serious damage.”
But many of Vance’s vulnerabilities were apparent well before he joined Trump’s ticket. Vance won his Senate seat in 2022 after emerging victorious from a heated and closely contested Republican primary in Ohio. Vance only won the primary by eight points, even after securing Trump’s crucial endorsement. The endorsement surprised many, as Vance had sharply criticized Trump in the past. Vance’s primary opponents repeatedly attacked him as a fake Trump supporter, reminding voters that he once described the former president as “America’s Hitler”.
After advancing from that ugly primary fight, Vance went on to defeat the Democrat Tim Ryan by six points, even though Trump had carried Ohio by eight points just two years earlier. (In comparison, Mike DeWine won re-election as Ohio’s governor by 25 points that same year.) Ryan was able to keep the race competitive enough to force outside Republican groups to spend tens of millions of dollars in Vance’s defense. The Senate Leadership Pac, which has close ties to the top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell, spent more than $32m in the race, according to OpenSecrets.
Since joining the Senate last year, Vance has become one of Trump’s most loyal supporters in Congress and embraced the former president’s agenda on everything from foreign policy to election denialism. In one illuminating interview with CNN in May, Vance suggested pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses should face criminal charges.
“So you agree that people who break in and vandalize a building should be prosecuted?” asked the CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins.
“Exactly,” Vance said.
Collins replied, “I’m just checking because you did help raise money for people who did so on January 6.”
All of this baggage has come to the forefront right as Vance is trying to introduce himself to a much larger audience of voters, and the search for a Democratic vice-presidential nominee has only exacerbated his troubles. The Democrats vying to become Harris’s running mate have taken to publicly lambasting Vance at every turn, offering a preview of a potential vice-presidential debate.
The Kentucky governor, Andy Beshear, who is reportedly on Harris’s shortlist of options, has accused Vance of caricaturing Appalachian residents in Hillbilly Elegy. In the book, Vance leaned into his family roots in eastern Kentucky, even though he was raised in an Ohio city near Cincinnati.
“I want the American people to know what a Kentuckian is and what they look like, because let me just tell you that JD Vance ain’t from here,” Beshear told MSNBC last week.
The governor added at a fundraiser in Des Moines, Iowa, last weekend: “This is somebody who exploited us – who used to come for weddings or funerals or a couple weeks in the summer to see his kin, and I respect that. But to claim that you know our culture and then to insult our people is just wrong.”
Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, who is also on Harris’s shortlist, has mocked Trump and Vance as “weird”, an attack line now echoed by other prominent Democrats.
“The fascists depend on us going back, but we’re not afraid of weird people,” Walz said last weekend at a Harris campaign event. “We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”
As of now, Trump has given no public indication that he intends to drop his running mate, and Vance is trying his hardest to shake off the damage of the past two weeks.
“I knew that when I came out of the gate there was going to be a couple of days of positive media coverage and then immediately they would go and attack me over everything that I had ever said in my life,” Vance told NBC News on Tuesday. “The price of entry of being on the national ticket and giving me an opportunity to govern is you have to … take the shots, and so I sort of expected it.”
But in a less than stellar review of Vance’s performance so far, Trump reminded voters that elections are not generally decided by the vice-presidential nominee.
“This is well-documented, historically, the vice-president in terms of the election does not have any impact, virtually no impact,” Trump said on Wednesday during his contentious interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention. “You can have a vice-president that is outstanding in every way, and I think JD is, I think all of them would have been, but you’re not voting that way. You’re voting for the president. You’re voting for me.”
Trump’s best hope for the moment is that voters will start forgetting about Vance. And after the month he’s had, Vance might not mind some obscurity either.