Why JD Vance could be the real Republican successor to Ronald Reagan?

Joined “Saturday Night Live” Tim Walz Pile-On this weekend, The governor of Minnesota is being made fun of Disastrous debate performance.

However, the Vice Presidential debate will not have much impact on the outcome of the election. Actually, due to the events happening in the country and abroad, it has mostly disappeared from discussion.

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

Vance’s favorability increased more and his unfavorability decreased more. voters who saw face to face Compared to Walz.

This is not what most pundits had predicted.

Those who knew the Ohio senator from his recent past thought he would be cantankerous and base-centric, like Donald Trump.

Others who knew him only on the basis of his thoughtless, provocative media-driven statements expected him to be provocative, ignorant, or more likely to shock than persuade.

However, those of us who knew him better knew even better.

We knew that Vance was a very articulate and intelligent person who could think on his feet. We also knew his focus was on average Americans, not just the Trumpian MAGA base.

This is the same Vance the nation saw last week.

He was humble, temperate and principled rather than ideological. He could answer any question without resorting to memorized lines or talking points, unlike his increasingly troubled rival Tim Walz.

In short, Vance was stylistically a throwback to an earlier era of intelligence and civility, while fundamentally he was much closer to the concerns of conservatives and independents, open to a new politics of rational problem solving.

This was a man who could confuse the so-called arbiters, not the other way around. Someone who can walk, talk and chew gum at the same time.

Someone who, if he handles himself well over the next few years, can create the conservative-populist realignment that has been the fruit of politics for over a decade.

This realignment builds on the working-class constituency that Trump has attracted, but goes beyond that. It is imbued with conservative ideas of freedom, family, faith, and patriotism, without reducing them to the ideological caricatures that many Republicans promote.

This is a case that a liberal Latino construction worker or checkout clerk can agree with every bit as much as a liberal suburban soccer mom can.

In Vance’s hands, conservative populism is not a prayer to a forgotten past or a means of attacking liberals and progressives. It is a national feast at which all citizens can feast.

To take this forward he will have to continue maturing as a politician. This means increasing his ability to reassure the base as well as mass appeal to conservative subjects.

This means mastering the intricacies of foreign-policy as much as he already understands the details of domestic-policy. This is meant to make it clear that anyone can have a strong belief without demanding that their followers share that belief.

The proof will be in the pudding, and there will be inevitable stumbles. But Vance is simply saying that he – like Lincoln, Reagan and every other transformational national leader – is human.

The establishments, left and right, won’t see this coming. Blinded by their own ideologies, they will see Vance as someone who is too extreme or too weak to win.

He will stick to his base-driven politics, a politics that emphasizes fanning the flames of old hatreds to maximize base voting.

But this is not what Americans want. The partisan registration data makes this abundantly clear.

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

outcome? The share of people saying they are Democrats has declined, as well as the Democratic share of partisan registration in states that require it.

Republicans have portrayed Democrats as un-American elites bent on oppressing the average person. GOP partisan ID has barely increased, and its share of partisan registration has increased only slightly in most places.

Instead, Americans are identifying themselves as independent on pollsters and voter registration forms. They may lean towards one party or the other when old political battles come to the fore. But they want something new that will benefit both parties.

That’s what Vance enticingly offered the country in the debate. Imagine what he could offer if he were the nominee regardless of Trump.

The 50-50 national politics of the last 30 years is a historical anomaly. American politics is usually ruled by one dominant party which forces the other to compete on its turf when it seeks power.

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

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

If that happens, we’ll miss the debate when Vance really stepped onto the national stage. He left as Trump’s student, 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.