Meet the Rugged Guys of the 2026 midterms & What happened last night in Maine 8&2SEP24

Democratic candidates Nathan Sage, left, and Graham Platner, right, and independent candidate Dan Osborn, center, are running for Senate in 2026. (Washington Post illustration; Bonnie Ryan/AP; Jerry Mennenga/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock; Graham Platner for U.S. Senate)

 Just as some universities grant students credits toward their desired degree for life experiences these candidates hope to earn enough votes from constituents who share similar life experiences and values and are seeking candidates who will be representatives and senators for all the people of America not just those who can afford to buy their state and federal representatives and senators, governors, presidents and vice presidents. From the Washington Post and Sen Bernie Sanders I-VT. AND PLEASE, if you can, make a donation to Bernie Sanders' 'Fighting Oligarchy Tour' and his campaign supporting bold, progressive Democratic AND Independent candidates across the country, like Graham Platner in Maine, candidates who are not afraid of NOT MY pres drumpf / trump, candidates who will represent ALL the American people, not just the 1%. I donated and hope you will too.....

Meet the Rugged Guys of the 2026 midterms

They’re bearded, tattooed veterans, and they’re running for Senate. Could they help break the GOP’s grip on Washington?

Yesterday at 5:00 a.m. EDT

When it comes to next year’s Senate race in Nebraska, Dan Osborn thinks he has the upper hand.

Specifically his right hand, which was mangled in a machine when he worked at a Kellogg’s plant 10 years ago.

It was a Friday afternoon, a day before his family was supposed to head off to Colorado on a skiing trip. Osborn, an industrial mechanic, was working at a high-speed machine that packaged little cereal bowls into big cases before being shipped off. “Zucaritas,” the bowls read — Spanish for “Frosted Flakes.” His right hand got too close to the work, and the machine pulled it in and bent it in a way hands don’t bend. (“Well, I can certainly send you some cool pictures, if you like gore,” he recently told The Washington Post.) His hand broke, along with his wrist, and “everything else got dislocated.” Five surgeries and 16 weeks later, Osborn was back at work — on the same machine that caused the injury.

“It’s just a machine,” he recalls thinking to himself. “It doesn’t know any better.”

The Washington machine? That’s another story. He’s hoping regular folks would trust him with that job.

“The fact that I’ve worked with my hands and provided for my family, working with my hands every day — I think a lot of people can relate to that,” Osborn, an independent running to unseat Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts, said in an interview.

He’s not the only Senate challenger who has decided that his hands were made for running.

In Maine, Marine veteran Graham Platner is running to unseat longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins. “People like to point out that I’m a political novice. I guess that’s true,” Platner, a Democrat and oyster farmer, told us. “I also think that the current situation the country finds itself in seems to have been built by experts, and I’m not super excited about the straits that we’re in.”

Over in Iowa, where Republican Sen. Joni Ernst is set to retire, Democrat Nathan Sage — a former mechanic and Marine veteran — is drawing a similar contrast with buttoned-up establishment types. “I might be a little bit hairy, I might be a little bit fat, I might be a little tattooed,” he said in an interview, “but I’m here standing up, willing to fight.”

Meet the Rugged Guys of the 2026 midterms. They are scruffy, solidly built, middle-aged White military veterans who work with their hands and look like they’re way more comfortable in plaid flannel than pinstripe suits. And they are banking that the antiestablishment populism that Republicans have embraced during the Trump era can work the other way, too.

“Every cycle, there is a different hot candidate profile that everybody’s trying to be,” said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who has worked for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona). Suburban soccer moms, veterans, self-funders. “This year, it seems like it’s these blue-collar workers.”

Independent candidate Dan Osborn departs an election night watch party in November, when he got a lot of votes but still lost to Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Nebraska). (Bonnie Ryan/AP)

The backdrop: Democrats are unpopular and facing a crisis with the working-class voters who once formed the base of their coalition. When Donald Trump won the presidential election last year, he did so in part by winning voters making less than $100,000 per year and also those making less than $50,000, according to network exit polls. (Kamala Harris won the making-over-$100,000 vote but lost the election.)

“To put it a little differently,” says David Litt, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama, “One of the divides that is the reason that Trump is president — as opposed to, you know, facing a great deal of jail time — is the political divide between people who work with their hands and people who work in front of a screen.” Democrats, Litt says, are now trying to emphasize that they can work with their hands.

“You’ve got to appeal to the working-class people in this country,” says Doug Sosnik, a Democratic strategist who has been studying the education divide. “Period.”

Osborn has filmed himself in his garage, installing a carburetor kit (and another time posted a photo of his dirty fingers).

Platner showed a gubernatorial candidate how to shuck oysters before an event.

Sage has talked about growing up poor in a trailer park.

All three men are clients of Fight Agency, a firm founded by strategists who worked for Sanders, Gallego and Sen. John Fetterman, the tattooed, gun-owning, hoodie-wearing Pennsylvania Democrat who rose swiftly from small-town mayor to the Senate thanks to his distinctly not-another-politician vibes. The new Rugged Guys’ ads — including sleek announcement videos set against electric guitar riffs — are the firm’s handiwork, according to Tommy McDonald, one of the agency’s partners. Osborn’s announcement video finds him sliding out from beneath a car, wearing denim and holding a socket wrench. “There’s a lot of rich guys in Washington like Pete Ricketts,” the candidate says in the video, “but not a lot with hands like these.”

“Authentic” is what they’re going for, McDonald says — you film at worksites, you keep the tone conversational, you let the candidates dress how they want.

“A lot of candidates have to go to Carhartt and buy a shirt. Most candidates don’t have them,” McDonald said. “These guys have them.”

Nathan Sage does a meet and greet with voters and potential supporters at a brewery in Sioux City, Iowa, in August. (Jerry Mennenga/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock)

Sage’s most recent jobs have not exactly been rugged; after working as a mechanic in the Marines and then as a civilian, he went to college and worked at a pair of radio stations before becoming the executive director of the chamber of commerce in Knoxville, Iowa. But he feels deeply connected to his upbringing in a Mason City trailer park. “We ate the same stuff: buttered noodles, S.O.S., whatever we could make to make it through it,” he said. When he started on his journey in electoral politics, he would complain to his staff about “call time” — the part of the schedule when candidates get on the horn to ask for donations.

“You don’t ask people for money where I come from,” Sage said. “You work for it. You mow lawns for $10. You fix a car for a six-pack. You work for that money. So to have to ask people for money now is degrading for somebody in the working class who’s never done that before.”

Osborn can relate. “I went through my contact list,” he said, “and I’m calling other mechanics and plumbers, and, you know, the people that I hang out with don’t have a lot of money.” For many working-class candidates, this means relying on online and social media fundraising. At the moment, Osborn — who unsuccessfully challenged Nebraska’s other Republican senator last year but ran well ahead of Harris in the Cornhusker State — is still clocking in to work as a steamfitter at a plant in Omaha until his next leave of absence, which is planned for the spring. He says his debt collectors “don’t give a s---” about the results of his last race, or that he’s running again. He spoke to us from an office at work where he can take breaks for some campaign-related calls. Later that weekend, there’d be a state fair and Labor Day parades to attend.

“My job can be pretty hazardous, so I need to stay focused while I’m at work,” he said. “But my race is always on the back of my head.”

Platner says he sometimes has taken calls while on the boat, and people on the other end would keep asking about noises they were hearing. “I’m like, I’m sorry, I’m shaking oysters right now,” the Maine Democrat said. Normally he’d be taking the boat out in the morning, and staying out all day until the evening, but the campaign has shifted things around. His business partner of eight years has picked up some of the slack when he can’t be out all day. The oyster farm is his passion, and Platner says he couldn’t have started it without the government health insurance that allowed him the chance to recover from “symptoms from my combat service” after his military deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. It allowed him to work on himself, he said.

“Everybody in the state of Maine should have access to that kind of support without having to hop over the bar of fighting in stupid foreign wars and watching their friends die,” he said.

Rocha, the strategist, worries about first-time candidates following the advice of consultants who aren’t working-class simply because they haven’t run for office before and think they don’t know better: “When some big consultant says, ‘That’s not how it’s done, you have to do it this way,’” he told us, “rarely do they push back, because they have no reference.” Would the campaigns be able to speak to working-class Latinos — a constituency Trump seemingly made inroads with, and one Rocha says Democrats have overlooked? He had a word of advice for the candidates, in a recent video: Don’t let the media consultants and pollsters tell you how to talk to the voters you seek. “You know more about working people.”

When it comes to winning political races, rugged, working-with-your-hands authenticity has its limits. There’s the words that the candidates speak, the jobs they’ve had, the clothes they wear and the vibes they give off. And then there’s the brand that goes with their name: “Democrat.” “Republican.” “Independent.”

“The most important brand that matters in politics to voters is party identification,” says Lynn Vavreck, a professor of political science at UCLA. “That is the brand.”

The parties are offering very different visions for the kind of world they want to build, Vavreck says. Voters know which of those two worlds they want to live in, and they want someone who will fight to build that world — whether that’s “a construction worker, a schoolteacher, a doctor or even a former member of Congress.”

“It matters very little,” she says, “who that person is.”

By Jesús Rodríguez

Jesús Rodríguez is a political reporter in The Washington Post's Style section, with a focus on features and profiles

What happened last night in Maine

Sisters and Brothers -

Donald Trump‘s move toward oligarchy and authoritarianism has created an unprecedented moment in modern American history. We must respond in an unprecedented way. Status quo politics is not good enough.

We need to elect candidates all over this country who have the guts not only to stand up to Trumpism, but to take on the monied interests of both parties and fight for a working class that has been ignored for far too long.

One of those candidates is Graham Platner who is running for the United States Senate in Maine.

Graham is a combat veteran and an oysterman who will do what Democrats don't often do, which is to give people something to vote for rather than just vote against.

Now you know as well as I do, running as a progressive in this country is never easy. Before Graham even takes on Susan Collins in the general election, he will likely have to defeat the Democratic Party establishment's candidate for Senate in this race.

He will need our support to win both the primary and the general election. So today, I am once again asking for your financial support.

Please use this link to make a contribution of $27 or whatever you can afford to Graham Platner's campaign for United States Senate in Maine. These early donations mean a lot to progressive candidates like Graham.

CONTRIBUTE NOW

Last night I spoke with Graham at a campaign rally in Portland, Maine attended by more than 6,500 people -- a crowd almost three times larger than the last time I spoke in Portland during our presidential campaign.

Here are some photos from before and during the event:

And what is clear to me after the rally is that there is an extraordinary amount of grassroots enthusiasm and energy not just behind Graham's campaign, but there remains tremendous enthusiasm in every corner of this country to take on Donald Trump's oligarchy, authoritarianism, kleptocracy and his horrific attacks against working families.

But no one person can do that alone. Not me. Not anyone else. The political revolution was never about electing just one person, it was about electing progressive candidates across the country with the guts to take on the billionaire class of this country.

So I need Graham in the Senate with me.

I need Graham with me in the Senate to help stop U.S. weapons going to the extremist Netanyahu government in Israel so that we end the starvation of children in Gaza. The U.S. must not be complicit in the destruction of the Palestinian people.

I need Graham with me in the Senate to take on the insurance companies and the drug companies who are profiting off of our broken and dysfunctional health care system, and to help us move toward Medicare for All.

I need Graham with me in the Senate to take on the greed of the fossil fuel industry and to move this country to energy efficiency, sustainable energy, and to help save the planet for our kids.

Mostly, I need Graham to help me take on the oligarchs who control our economy, our media and political system and to help us move toward a government that works for all of us and not just the one percent.

But there is only one way Graham will defeat his eventual Democratic primary opponent and eventually Susan Collins -- and that is if we are in this together.

Please make a contribution of $27 or whatever you can afford directly to Graham Platner's campaign today.

If you've stored your info with ActBlue, we'll process your contribution instantly:

CONTRIBUTE $27   CONTRIBUTE OTHER

When we act collectively we have the ability not only to create a dynamic progressive movement, but we will be able to transform our nation and create a government that represents all of us, not just the people on top. That’s the goal. Let’s do it.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

 

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It’s time for the US to guarantee healthcare to all 4MAI25

SENATOR Bernie Sanders I-VT continues to fight for Universal Healthcare for all Americans, rich, poor and everybody in between. We are the only major country on Earth that refuses to guarantee healthcare as a human right. The United States may have the best healthcare in the world, but only for those who can afford it. The time for Universal Healthcare is now, everyone should e mail their representative and senators and insist they support Sen Sanders', Rep Pramila Jayapal's  D-WA  and Rep Debbie Dingell's D-MI Medicare For All legislation. Here is the article Sen Sanders wrote that was published in the Guardian last week.

Last week, along within 15 other Senators and over 100 members of the House, Rep. Pramila Jayapal and I introduced Medicare for All legislation. All Americans understand that the U.S. healthcare system is broken and outrageously expensive. The function of a healthcare system is not to provide billions in profits for insurance companies and drug companies. It is to provide quality care for all as a human right. The time is NOW to pass Medicare for All.

Attached is an op-ed I wrote that recently appeared in the Guardian newspaper. - Bernie

---

It’s time for the US to guarantee healthcare to all
We spend almost twice as much per capita on healthcare as any other country on Earth. It’s time to change that.

Bernie Sanders
Tue 29 Apr 2025

I have held public meetings all over Vermont and in many parts of the country. At these gatherings I almost always ask a very simple question: is our healthcare system broken? And the answer I always receive is: Yes! The American healthcare system is broken. It is outrageously expensive. It is horrifically cruel.

Today, we spend almost twice as much per capita on healthcare as any other country on Earth. According to the most recent data, the United States spends $14,570 per person on healthcare compared with just $5,640 in Japan, $6,023 in the United Kingdom, $6,931 in Australia, $7,013 in Canada and $7,136 in France. And yet, despite our huge expenditures, we remain the only major country on Earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people as a human right.

While the insurance companies and drug companies continue to make huge profits, over 85 million Americans are either uninsured or under-insured. The result: some 68,000 people in our country die each year because they can’t afford to go to a doctor when they should, and more than half a million Americans go bankrupt due to medically related debt. In the US today, 42% of cancer patients deplete their entire life savings within the first two years of their diagnosis while one out of every four declared bankruptcy or lost their homes to foreclosure or eviction in 2022.

That is insane and unspeakable. Getting cancer in the US should not lead to financial ruin.

In terms of life expectancy, we live four years shorter, on average, than people in other wealthy countries, while the typical working-class person in the US lives seven fewer years than the wealthy. We also have the dubious distinction of having, by far, the highest infant mortality rate of any other wealthy country on Earth.

As bad as our overall healthcare system is, our primary care system is even worse. Today, tens of millions of people live in communities where they cannot find a doctor, a dentist or a psychologist even when they have insurance, while others have to wait months to get seen. Despite our massive healthcare expenditures, we don’t have enough doctors, dentists, nurses, mental health practitioners, pharmacists or home healthcare workers – and one out of four Americans cannot afford to purchase the medicine their doctors prescribe.

For all of these reasons and many more, I am proud to be re-introducing Medicare for All in the Senate. My colleague, the representative Pramila Jayapal, is introducing this same bill in the House.

Our legislation would provide comprehensive healthcare coverage to all without out-of-pocket expenses and, unlike the current system, it would provide full freedom of choice regarding healthcare providers.

No more insurance premiums, no more deductibles, no more co-payments, no more filling out endless forms and fighting with insurance companies.

And comprehensive means the coverage of dental care, vision, hearing aids, prescription drugs and home and community-based healthcare.

Importantly, Medicare for All would give Americans the freedom to switch jobs without losing their health insurance. Under our legislation, healthcare becomes a human right, guaranteed to all, and not a job benefit.

Would a Medicare-for-all healthcare system be expensive? Yes. But, while providing comprehensive healthcare for all, it would be significantly LESS expensive than our current dysfunctional system because it would eliminate an enormous amount of the bureaucracy, profiteering, administrative costs and misplaced priorities inherent in our current for-profit system. In fact, the congressional budget office has estimated that Medicare for All would save Americans $650bn a year.

Under Medicare for All there would no longer be armies of insurance employees billing us, telling us what is covered and what is not covered and hounding us to pay our hospital bills. This simplicity not only substantially reduces administrative costs, but it would make life a lot easier for patients, doctors and nurses who would never again have to fight their way through the nightmare of insurance company bureaucracy.

As we speak, Republicans are working overtime to make a bad healthcare situation even worse. They want to pass a “reconciliation bill” that would decimate Medicaid and throw millions of Americans off the healthcare they have in order to give huge tax breaks to billionaires.

Obviously, we must defeat that terrible legislation. But we must do much more. We cannot simply defend the status quo in healthcare and the Affordable Care Act – legislation that has provided massive amounts of corporate welfare to the big insurance companies and big drug companies – while premiums, deductibles, co-payments and the price of medicine has soared.

The time is NOW to rethink healthcare in America. The time is NOW to declare that healthcare in our country is a right and not a privilege. The time is NOW to stand up to the greed and power of special interests who make huge profits off of a cruel and broken system. The time is NOW to pass Medicare for All.

Enacting Medicare for All would be a transformative moment for our country.

It would not only keep people healthier, happier and increase life expectancy, it would be a major step forward in creating a more vibrant democracy. Imagine what it would mean for the people of our country if we had a government that represented the needs of ordinary people and not just powerful corporate interests and billionaire campaign donors.

This is America. We can do it.

 

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JD Vance, in 2020 messages, said Trump ‘thoroughly failed to deliver’ & What JD Vance’s private Trump comments tell us 27SEP24

 HYPOCRIT fascist jd vance attacks Vice President Kamala Harris for changing her position on some issues but doesn't seem to have a problem being a flipper himself regarding his opinions of donald drumpf / trump on some policy issues. From the Washington Post.....

JD Vance, in 2020 messages, said Trump ‘thoroughly failed to deliver’

In previously undisclosed messages, the future vice-presidential nominee said Trump had not fulfilled his economic agenda and predicted he would lose to Biden.

By Peter Jamison

Peter Jamison is a reporter on The Post's political enterprise and investigations team.follow on X @petejamison

September 27, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Vice-presidential nominee JD Vance has a go-to explanation for his evolution from outspoken critic to impassioned defender of Donald Trump: He says he was converted by Trump’s achievements in the White House.

Vance has said watching the former president enact his populist agenda for left-behind Americans transformed him from a “Never Trump” conservative in 2016 to a Trump supporter in 2020.

But Vance privately expressed a very different verdict on Trump as the former president’s first term was nearing its end, previously unreported messages obtained by The Washington Post show.

In the direct messages — sent during Trump’s final year in office to an acquaintance over the social media platform then known as Twitter — Vance harshly criticized his future running mate’s record of governance and said Trump had not fulfilled his economic agenda.

“Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” Vance wrote in February 2020.

He also offered a prediction: Joe Biden, he believed, was going to win the 2020 election.

“I think Trump will probably lose,” he wrote in a message in June 2020, a few months before ballots were cast in an election that Vance would later claim, falsely and repeatedly, was stolen by the Democrats.

The critical messages, shared with The Post by their recipient on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about retaliation, cast doubt on Vance’s oft-recited account of how and when he embraced Trumpism. They were written years after Vance’s previously reported remarks attacking Trump, such as his statements in 2016 that Trump was “reprehensible,” “cultural heroin” and possibly “America’s Hitler.”

In a statement, Vance spokesman William Martin said Vance’s 2020 assessment of Trump’s failure to deliver on his economic policies was not meant as a criticism of the former president, but of “establishment Republicans who thwarted much of Trump’s populist economic agenda to increase tariffs and boost domestic manufacturing in Congress.”

Martin added, “Fortunately, Sen. Vance believes that Republicans in Congress are much more aligned with President Trump’s agenda today than they were back then, so he is confident that they won’t run into those same issues within the party.”

Vance’s campaign did not respond to questions about his prediction that Trump would lose the 2020 election.

While Martin said Vance recalled the 2020 exchanges, he criticized The Post for not identifying the person who disclosed the messages and for not sharing with the campaign the entirety of the conversation, portions of which were withheld to protect the person’s anonymity. Martin said The Post was engaged in “nothing more than unethical journalism.”

Vance has never pinpointed a moment when he became a fully committed Trump supporter, instead describing a gradual conversion away from his earlier views that was complete by the end of Trump’s first term. He says he was moved “to change my tune about President Trump from 2016 to 2020” and that he voted for Trump in 2020. He has sought to isolate his critiques of Trump to a chapter of his life that is now in the distant past.

“Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016,” Vance said shortly after he began campaigning for Senate in 2021. “And I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy. I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.”

But the messages show that Vance still took a dim view of Trump’s achievements long after 2016 — and after almost four years of observing how the man he now calls “the best president of my lifetime” behaved in office. In fact, during the same June 2020 exchange when he said Trump was likely to lose the upcoming election, Vance seemed to suggest he had been offered a position in the Trump administration.

He claimed he had rejected it.

“I’ve already turned down my appointment from the emperor,” Vance wrote — adding a winking emoji — after his interlocutor referred to the possibility of a government appointment by “Emperor Trump.” Pressed by his acquaintance about what job he had been offered, Vance replied, “I’m not going to say over twitter messenger.”

Neither Trump nor Vance has ever disclosed that he was offered a role working for Trump before he was selected as the GOP vice-presidential nominee in July. The Vance campaign did not address questions about whether Vance had been offered a job.

The exchanges are further evidence of Vance’s penchant for engaging in prolific and sometimes incautious dialogues with digital pen pals, including a 20-month texting conversation with the far-right blogger and conspiracy theorist Charles Johnson.

Vance rose to fame in 2016 with his critically acclaimed memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” about growing up in a Midwestern family riven by drug addiction. A Yale Law School graduate who at the time worked as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, he established his reputation as a fluent commentator on the despair of the White working class — and as one of a minority of conservatives opposed to Trump, whom he described as “leading the white working class to a very dark place.”

Vance has said he voted for independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin in 2016 but changed his mind about Trump over the next four years because, as he put it in 2021, “he actually honored his promises” in the White House.

The messages obtained by The Post reveal Vance in a garrulous and seemingly unguarded mood. He wrote them after initiating contact with their recipient, whose published writing interested him.

In their exchanges, Vance criticized the left in a way that aligns with his more recent public statements, worrying about “the woke stuff” and saying he believed progressive Democrats will inevitably be “coopted by financial elites.” He also talked about his belief that government policy should make it easier for women to stay out of the workforce to care for their children, if they desire to do so.

But he also expressed views that appear jarringly at odds with the positions he would soon adopt as a politician. In one message, he mused about how the right focused on the harm caused by pandemic lockdowns while underplaying the dangers of the coronavirus.

“I’m sympathetic to the idea that there’s a lot of long-term economic damage being done. But it’s always draped in this bizarre desire to pretend the virus itself isn’t a problem,” he wrote in May 2020.

The next year, as a Senate candidate, Vance denounced what he described as a “cabal” of public health experts, led by White House adviser Anthony S. Fauci, that he said was seeking to suppress American liberties with unreasonable pandemic restrictions. As a senator he has pushed to ban federal mask mandates.

Martin, the Vance campaign spokesman, said, “Just like billions of other people all over the world, Sen. Vance’s views on COVID in May of 2020 were not the same as his views on the pandemic in 2021.”

In another of the 2020 messages, he expressed openness to a holy grail of the progressive left: a government-run universal health-care system, or Medicare-for-all. In a February 2020 message Vance wrote that “M4A,” as he called it, “is maybe a net positive, maybe not (details matter).”

Medicare-for-all, a plan in which the government would provide health insurance to every citizen — effectively replacing the private health insurance industry — was briefly endorsed by Kamala Harris during her unsuccessful 2019 presidential bid, when she tacked to the left in the primary. As the Democratic nominee she has distanced herself from that position but is still subject to attacks from the right — including the Trump campaign — for once supporting the idea.

In recent weeks Vance has argued for a strikingly different approach to health coverage, saying the federal government should roll back the regulations of the Affordable Care Act and allow insurers to group the sickest people into separate “risk pools.” Critics of that plan say it would result in people with preexisting conditions being forced to pay exorbitant insurance premiums, or not being able to find insurance at all.

Vance’s spokesman said the vice-presidential nominee now believes Medicare-for-all to be bad policy.

“Sen. Vance, like President Trump, doesn’t want people dying in the streets, but believes the details matter,” Martin said. “And the Democrats top-down Medicare for All plan would make healthcare worse for Americans.”

Vance’s judgment that Trump had “thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism” came in the context of a discussion of wealthy business executives — such as former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg or former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi — running for office.

Vance said he doubted that Trump’s richest donors would abandon him in 2020 because he had continued to serve their interests as president, despite his populist rhetoric.

“Not sure any of these people feel like they need to switch sides,” he wrote.

Vance gave no hint in the messages of the enthusiasm with which he would soon publicly embrace Trumpism. But he did indicate that he was thinking carefully about his future.

In February 2020, he wrote to his acquaintance that he believed they were both working with the same long-term approach to achieve their political goals.

“You’re playing a strategic game,” Vance wrote, “the same as me.”

What JD Vance’s private Trump comments tell us

It looks like Vance’s politically expedient Trump conversion happened significantly later than we previously knew. But that’s not the only point.

By Aaron Blake

Aaron Blake is senior political reporter, writing for The Fix. A Minnesota native, he has also written about politics for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and The Hill newspaper.

follow on X @aaronblake

September 27, 2024 at 6:10 p.m. EDT

It’s been evident for some time that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) underwent a politically convenient evolution on Donald Trump. A staunch critic of Trump when he first ran for president in 2016, Vance gradually reinvented himself publicly and then fully embraced Trump for his own Senate race in 2022 — when he needed the votes of Trump supporters in a Republican primary. Now he’s Trump’s running mate.

Vance has always cast this evolution as a genuine shift born of reflection on Trump’s actual record. And that’s difficult to disprove.

But private Vance comments newly reported by The Washington Post’s Peter Jamison add a whole new layer to questions about what Vance really believes — because of both the comments’ substance and their timeline.

It wouldn’t be the first time an increasingly powerful politician seemed to favor strategic calculations over principled decisions. But the timeline here is important.

Vance’s comments criticizing Trump in 2016 have been widely and frequently reported. Vance suggested Trump might be “America’s Hitler” and called him “cultural heroin.” He criticized Trump for making immigrants and Muslims afraid.

But there wasn’t as much in that vein after Trump took office — at least publicly. What has come out has generally emerged from records of private comments Vance made.

When Vance first started his run for Senate, CNN reported that he had still been disparaging Trump privately in the summer of 2017, calling him a “moral disaster” and saying his administration had “no domestic policy agenda besides tax cuts.”

And now, Jamison reports this kind of criticism lasted well into Trump’s presidency — into Trump’s final year, in fact.

In direct messages sent in February 2020, Vance told someone he was corresponding with: “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).”

As Jamison notes, this is a contrast to what Vance would say just a year and a half later as an Ohio Senate candidate, when he said Trump “actually honored his promises.” Vance during the campaign would label Trump a “great president.”

It’s theoretically possible that Trump’s actions at the end of his presidency changed Vance’s mind, or that reflection brought Vance to a new verdict, as Vance has posited. It’s also possible Vance was saying things he thought his correspondent wanted to hear. Vance’s office told The Post that his comments meant to refer to “establishment Republicans who thwarted” Trump’s agenda.

But the comments are also a contrast to what Vance had said publicly even before February 2020. Toward the middle of Trump’s presidency, Vance began emphasizing the difference between Trump’s unwieldy personal style and his actual policies. And in May 2019, he said at an event held by the American Conservative that Trump’s policy toward China had been a “wild success.”

“He’s certainly nailed the China issue in a way that no American president has for the past 20 or 30 years,” said Vance, who nine months later would privately label Trump’s China policy “disjointed.”

The other thing that struck me from The Post’s new reporting is how Vance essentially grants that he’s making political calculations — and not for the first time.

In the same private February 2020 exchange, Vance’s interlocutor suggested the two of them were both working toward similar political goals.

“You’re playing a strategic game,” Vance wrote, “the same as me.”

In the 2017 comments unearthed by CNN, Vance alluded to how his criticisms of his party had marginalized him. In the course of his comment about Trump being a “moral disaster,” Vance scoffed at his own political prospects, while citing his opposition to Republicans’ health-care proposal.

“Can you imagine running as an anti-AHCA populist who thinks Trump is a moral disaster?” Vance wrote. “Where’s my constituency?”

(Vance was courted by some Republicans to run for Senate in 2018, but he passed on that opportunity.)

Even when Vance began running for Senate in 2021, he gestured, not subtly, at the idea that he had to take his medicine and back Trump. He told Time magazine just a day after announcing his campaign that Trump is “the leader of this movement.”

He added: “And if I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him.”

It is not news that politicians make political calculations and adjust what they say to please the voters they need. This is Politics 101.

But politicians’ evolutions on Trump have often been particularly drastic, as Vance’s certainly is. That makes it logical to wonder what they truly understand themselves to be enabling. And for Vance, as he tries to ascend to an office a stop away from the presidency, that just became a more pertinent question.