JD Vance embraces tricky role as Trump’s midterm messenger — and potential successor

By Steve Contorno, CNN

Dallas (CNN) — Behind closed doors on Thursday, Vice President JD Vance urged a room full of Republicans to sell voters on the administration’s more popular achievements that he worried weren’t always breaking through.

One person, however, has proved particularly difficult to keep on message: President Donald Trump.

Since joining Trump’s ticket in 2024, Vance has taken on the role of disciplined translator for a president whose instinct-driven improvisational style enthralls his admirers but often pulls attention from the message his advisers want voters to hear. Now, with control of Congress at stake in November, that role has taken new urgency. Vance is expected to aggressively campaign for Republican candidates — “divide and conquer” with Trump, as one source close to him put it — as the two carve up the midterm map.

The stakes for both Vance and the Republican Party will stretch beyond November, as he weighs his own future as the president’s likeliest political heir.

Vance offered a telling example of his approach Thursday at an event outside Trump’s two-day midterm convention in Dallas. According to audio obtained by CNN, Vance told convention attendees from his home state of Ohio and the battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that TrumpRx — a website for Americans to search for prescription drug discounts — was “the single issue that has the most broad, popular appeal.”

“You see this in every poll that we’ve ever seen,” Vance said.

Yet, Trump waited until the second hour of his midterm convention speech Wednesday to mention the initiative — and even then did not namecheck the program that bears his surname.

Vance had his own turn before the party faithful Thursday, headlining night two of the Republican Party’s midterm convention (before Trump returned to the stage to close out the gathering). There, Vance playfully batted away chants of “JD! 48!” — a reference to the hope that he will succeed the 47th president — as premature, while sidestepping the topics that animated Trump’s own remarks, like his surprise pledge to cut Americans $5,000 checks if his party holds power, the Iran war and tariffs.

Instead, he laid out a vision for Trump’s America First movement focused on families and forgotten Americans that could serve as a platform for a presidential campaign. He also urged Republicans not to let differences divide them to the benefit of Democrats, as he continues a months-long push to keep Trump’s fragile coalition together for the midterm elections and beyond.

“Don’t give the country over to a bunch of crazy people because you happen to disagree with us on a policy issue here or there,” he said.

The appearance served as a preview of how Vance intends to approach the final two months before Election Day. He’ll be deployed on the trail in a similar fashion as 2024, when the campaign leaned into his relative youth and blue-collar roots to connect with young people, especially men, and Rust Belt workers.

Persistent Vance-Rubio questions

The vice president has said he will wait until after the midterms to decide whether to run for president in 2028.

Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer at Turning Point Action, told CNN that he expects the outcome of the midterm elections “matters a whole lot” in Vance’s calculus. Turning Point, a conservative organization founded by the assassinated activist Charlie Kirk, has endorsed Vance and is seen as a political operation in waiting for him if he wants it.

“If I was the vice president, I would want to see what the outcomes look like from November,” Bowyer said. “Some of that you can control as the administration. Some of it you can’t.”

Already Vance is increasingly behaving like a politician with higher aspirations. He published his second book this summer on his Catholic faith and engaged in an extensive publicity tour that included sit-downs with “The View,” conservative influencers and Christian media.

He is traveling, endorsing, and podcasting. He also moonlights as his party’s finance chair, a role that conveniently puts him in front of GOP’s deep-pocketed donors.

Inside the convention at the American Airlines Center, there was widespread recognition that Vance is the leading contender to become the party’s 2028 nominee. Some are eager for Trump to declare it out loud.

“He truly gets the MAGA movement and all the parts of it,” said AK Kamara, a Republican National Committeeman from Minnesota. “He’s almost like the next iteration of what MAGA truly should be, which is, ‘we have to be focused on America first.’”

But mention Vance and 2028 to Trump’s supporters and another name often surfaces, sometimes unprompted: Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Though Rubio has publicly said he would support Vance if he runs, plenty of conservatives still view him as a shrewd, competent operator in Trump’s Washington with presidential potential.

“I really favor somebody that’s doing 12 jobs for the price of one,” said Deanna Mclaughlin, who works in a Tennessee congressional office.

Republicans are also divided on how much say Trump should have in choosing who carries his movement forward. While McLaughlin said “the people need to decide,” Rusat Ramgopal, executive director for the Queens County, New York, GOP said he hoped Trump, Rubio and Vance would work out the party’s future together.

“It would be more beneficial to the party to not have the two biggest names duking it out in a primary,” he said. “I think a unified ticket with those two, the biggest names in the party, will be a winning ticket in 2028.”

Carving his own path

In the near term, Vance remains one of Trump’s closest advisers and most ardent public defenders, even as the White House navigates a Middle East war that the vice president had privately expressed reservations about from the start.

But in recent months, Vance has seized on his assignment to head an anti-fraud task force as an opportunity to carve out a more distinctive message in speeches around the country — as well as use the frequent travel to deepen ties with the GOP donors and party officials he’ll need if he opts to run in 2028.

During those appearances, Vance has struck a more accommodating tone on the economy, eschewing Trump’s blanket dismissals of voters’ affordability concerns in favor of rhetoric that acknowledges Americans’ frustration while simultaneously urging them to stay the course. Vance notably has expressed far more sympathy for voters’ worries about data centers than Trump has.

The domestic tour has also allowed him to raise his public profile through focusing on anti-fraud issues that play well across the Republican Party, GOP operatives noted — rather than subjecting him to constant questions about the war in Iran.

“He connects uniquely,” one Trump ally said of Vance. “He’s a very approachable guy and appealing to a very important demographic in the Trump coalition.”

Yet while Trump has continued to praise Vance in public and private, there’s little expectation that the president will move any time soon to clear the 2028 field for him. Vance and his team will not only have to determine his path forward, but navigate Trump’s own desire to cling to the spotlight as long as possible.

It was notable that Vance spoke on the final day of the two-night convention — and also that Trump appeared again right after him to close out the event.

“They can’t move before the midterms,” Curt Mills, executive director of “The American Conservative” and a Vance ally, said of his turn on the national stage. “The question is, is it a November decision, a February decision or a spring decision?”

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CNN’s Adam Cancryn and Kit Maher contributed to this report.