Responses to my queries suggest that Vance has provoked a kind of morbid curiosity among political scientists and historians.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor Vance, simply being Trump\u2019s V.P. has a cost to his popularity,\u201d wrote Diane J. Heith, a professor of government and politics at St. John\u2019s University. \u201cRhetorical skill and persuasiveness are hard to separate from ideology and issue positions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vance\u2019s rhetoric, Heith continued,<\/p>\n
does suggest a mindfulness of the competing pressures of the job. Vance came to the V.P. with his own issue positions, and some significantly differ from the president\u2019s.<\/p>\n
When differing perspectives emerge publicly, like with Iran, Vance is placed in the awkward position of massaging his rhetoric to support the president\u2019s while not diluting his own positions too far. It is a difficult tightrope to walk, and that struggle will get harder if he runs in 2028.<\/p>\n
John Murphy, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, argued by email that Vance\u2019s problems are of his own making, rather than related to the structural constraints of the vice presidency:<\/p>\n
Vance always tries to generalize \u2014 he wants to be seen, I think, as a public intellectual, so he\u2019s willing to exaggerate, distort, twist the specific so that it \u201cproves\u201d a larger theory.<\/p>\n
His memoir caricatured many in his life to show the obstacles he overcame and to show that those people wouldn\u2019t try hard enough and he did.<\/p>\n
He told tales of Haitians to attack immigration in the debate.<\/p>\n
In each case, Murphy contended, \u201cit was about a theory \u2014 rising out of poverty, great replacement stuff, communism v. capitalism. Even on simple stuff \u2014 Vance felt the need to change his name.\u201d<\/p>\n
Karrin Vasby Anderson, a professor of communication studies and co-director of the Center for Democracy, Art, and Popular Culture at Colorado State University, wrote:<\/p>\n
Vance has an authenticity problem that stems both from the range of small and large things he has shifted on since entering public life, and from the fact that he just seems like a typical politician.<\/p>\n
Some of what you are sensing no doubt emanates from his ideological flexibility. There is a sense that he lacks a core set of beliefs and, therefore, lacks stability and groundedness.<\/p>\n
There is, according to Anderson, only one constituency firmly in Vance\u2019s corner: \u201cIt\u2019s men who spend time in the so-called manosphere, which is where Vance cultivated his political support. He knows how to talk with that demographic on their own terms, so they are more likely to identify with him.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is survey data that provides inferential evidence in support of Anderson\u2019s thesis.<\/p>\n