Why J.D. Vance might be Reagan’s real Republican heir

“Saturday Night Live” joined in the Tim Walz pile-on this weekend, mocking the Minnesota governor’s disastrous debate performance.

The vice-presidential debate won’t affect the election’s outcome very much, though. Indeed, it has mostly dropped from discussion owing to events at home and abroad.

But that doesn’t mean it won’t have lasting impact. J.D. Vance’s performance was so compelling that it has immediately marked him as the next potential great force in national politics.

Vance’s favorability rose more and his unfavorability dropped more among voters who watched the faceoff than Walz’s did.

That’s not what most pundits predicted.

Those who knew the Ohio senator only from his recent past thought he would be pugnacious and base-focused like Donald Trump.

Others who knew him only from the media-driven accounts of his off-the-cuff provocative statements expected him to be flippant, ignorant or primed to shock rather than persuade.

Those of us who knew him better, though, knew better.

We knew Vance is a sharply articulate and intelligent man who could think on his feet. We also knew he’s focused on average Americans, not just the Trumpian MAGA base.

That’s the Vance the nation saw last week.

He was polite, temperate and principled rather than ideological. He could answer a question without recourse to memorized lines or talking points, unlike his increasingly flustered opponent, Tim Walz.

Vance in short was stylistically a throwback to an earlier era of intelligence and manners while substantively someone very much in tune with the concerns of conservatives and independents open to a new politics of prudential problem solving.

This was a man who could confound the so-called moderators rather than the other way around. Someone who could walk, talk and chew gum at the same time.

Someone who, if he handles himself well over the next few years, could produce the conservative-populist realignment that has been the low-hanging fruit of politics for more than a decade.

That realignment builds on the working-class constituency Trump has attracted but moves beyond that. It is infused by conservative ideas of liberty, family, faith and patriotism without reducing them to the ideological caricatures too many Republicans peddle.

It’s one the moderate Latino construction worker or checkout clerk can agree with every bit as much as the moderate suburban soccer mom.

In Vance’s hands, conservative populism isn’t a paean for a forgotten past or a cudgel to hammer liberals and progressives with. It’s a national banquet at which all citizens can feast.

He’s going to have to keep maturing as a politician for this to transpire. That means increasing his ability to weave conservative themes into mass appeals while simultaneously reassuring the base.

That means mastering foreign-policy intricacies as much as he already understands domestic-policy details. It means making clear one can be of strong faith without demanding all who follow him share that faith.

The proof will be in the pudding, and there will be inevitable stumbles. But that’s just saying Vance — like Lincoln, Reagan and every other transformative national leader — is human.

The establishment, right and left, won’t see this coming. Blinded by their ideologies, they will see Vance as someone who’s too extreme or too callow to win.

They’ll remain wedded to their base-driven politics, a politics that emphasizes stoking the fires of old hatreds to maximize base turnout.

But that’s what Americans don’t want. The partisan registration figures are making that clear in spades.

For eight years the national media have painted Republicans as un-American authoritarians and Democrats as the only true representatives of the American ideal.

The result? The share of people saying they’re Democrats is down, as is the Democratic share of partisan registration in states requiring that.

Republicans have painted Democrats as un-American elites driven to tyrannize the average person. GOP partisan ID has barely increased, and its share of partisan registration is in most places only slightly up.

Instead, Americans are identifying themselves, to pollsters and on voter registration forms, as independents. They may lean toward one party or another as the old political battles unfold. But they want something new that takes the best of both sides.

That’s what Vance tantalizingly offered the nation in the debate. Imagine what he could offer if he were the nominee, untethered to Trump.

The 50-50 national politics of the last 30 years is a historical anomaly. American politics is typically governed by one dominant party that forces the other to compete on its ground if it wants power.

That party was the Democrats between 1932 and 1984. Ronald Reagan brought the two parties into rough parity, but neither his GOP successors nor his Democrat counterparts have been able to break the deadlock.

The Vance we saw in the debate can do that. He can become the GOP’s FDR, completing Reagan’s project of making the Republican Party America’s natural, working-class-dominated, governing party.

If that happens, we’ll look back on the debate as the moment Vance truly stepped onto the national stage. He went on as Trump’s understudy, but he came back as a star.

Henry Olsen, a political analyst and commentator, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.