JD Vance is the Worst VP Pick in Modern History

And I will prove it.

Ever since JD Vance rose to prominence roughly a decade ago, he has made mainstream liberal journalists look like fools. He also hasn’t done it in quite the way you’d expect. Most of the time that right-wing politicians like him prove Democratic commentators wrong, they do so by securing power after being counted out. They are like Donald Trump in 2016, winning after everyone said they would lose. They are like Mitch McConnell during his tenure as Senate Majority Leader, ruthlessly securing power as Democrats anxiously wait for their “fever” to break. Very rarely do they see themselves feted by these exact groups as imposing and intimidating, only to completely fail to pan out.

Unfortunately for Senator Vance, this has been the exact case for him ever since he rose to prominence during the 2016 election. Practically every single prediction made about him from these sets has failed to come to pass. When he first began writing, he was cast as the thinking man’s conservative. Instead, he ended up revealing himself as an intellectual mediocrity. When his autobiography still became a bestseller regardless, he was cast as one of America’s last truly principled conservatives. Instead, he ended up being perhaps the most egregious of the GOP’s many, many Trump cocksuckers. When he finally entered electoral politics in 2021, this time with a brand new “populist” worldview, he was cast as an electoral juggernaut in the making. But instead, he put up one of the most egregiously awful performances of any Republican candidate in the country in the 2022 midterms, requiring a gargantuan bailout to win in a solid Trump state against a weak opponent.

I take some pride in having picked up on this fraudulence relatively early. While the press still insisted on covering him as a fascinating, meaningful figure even after his pathetic result in 2022, I stood firm in my belief that LeVance had no real rings. When I published my tier list of potential Republican presidential candidates, I put him firmly at rock bottom. When I included him in my tier list of Trump’s potential VP nominees, I put him in F Tier once again. I even conducted a study to support my theory that the “right-wing populist movement” Vance claims to represent is not just unpopular, but hardly even a real movement at all—just a way for people like JD to feel better about themselves. If JD only has one hater left, that’s me; if he has no haters, that means I am no longer on this Earth.

In light of this, the easy thing to do right now would be to take a victory lap about how utterly awful his rollout as Trump’s VP pick has been. I would say everything that you all already know: that he’s an insecure, out-of-touch freak with mommy issues so severe that he shouldn’t be allowed within 100 feet of a CrossFit. I’d say that voters can see this, that they hate it, and that it could very well cost Trump the election. But you all know this already, so just repeating it wouldn’t be adequate to move the frontiers of Vance-hating forward.

In order to do so, I have decided to take the road less traveled. I have taken the position that JD Vance is not just a bad VP pick, but the worst VP pick in modern history—even worse than the one you’re thinking of right now. In this article, I will seek to prove it by going through all of the other contenders for the title, one by one.

Contender #1: Sarah Palin, 2008