JD Vance Polling Worse Than Kamala Harris Was: ‘Perhaps Worse Than Any New VP in the History of Polling’

Oliver Contreras/Sipa USA via AP Images

Nobody likes me
Everybody hates me
Guess I’ll go eat worms

– Children’s folk song, “Nobody Likes Me (Think I’ll Go Eat Worms)”

It’s not true that nobody at all likes Vice President JD Vance, so he can hold off on the limbless invertebrate snacks for now, but he is struggling to keep his favorability ratings above water in the first few months of his term. Polls show Vance’s popularity ranking lower than his predecessor, former Vice President Kamala Harris — and pretty much every other vice president in modern polling history.

Popularity for vice presidents is a tricky business, as they can end up getting saddled with the problems and challenges of the president but lack the political capital to establish much of their own agenda, and it’s all the more fraught when they have ambitions to run for president themselves.

Adding to the anxiety and pressure on the third-youngest vice president in U.S. history is the fact that President Donald Trump declined to name Vance as his preferred successor during an interview last month on Fox News — plus the rumors that Donald Trump Jr. is considering throwing his own red cap in the ring in 2028. (Trump Jr. denied he was looking to run in a statement with some very colorful language when Mediaite’s Diana Falzone reached out for comment, but multiple sources nonetheless told her the president’s eldest son was indeed thinking of running.)

When Trump tapped Vance to be his running mate, the then-39-year-old was the least experienced veep candidate in modern history, less than two years into his very first Senate term, his very first elected office ever. Vance turned 40 and he and Trump won the election. Then Elon Musk swooped into the White House with his DOGE team and an unprecedented level of power and influence, drawing a swarm of lawsuits and media attention.

Vance’s press coverage has been largely overshadowed by the antics of Trump with his executive orders and pronouncements claiming a right to Canada and Musk with his chainsaw and Tesla woes, but he has gotten headlines for the infamous Oval Office clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a speech where he tried to lecture Western Europe about free speech, and unhinged insults and baseless accusations he’s hurled at Harris, like his comments on a podcast this week where he accused her of starting her days when she was vice president with “four shots of vodka.”

He might be tempted to take swipes at Harris because he’s seen the polling numbers, and she easily beats him. Bill Scher at Washington Monthly dug through years of polling of the favorability ratings for Vance, Harris, and others who have once been first in the line of presidential succession. Vance puts up a poor showing.

“Vance’s favorability is worse than Harris’s at the same two-month mark and perhaps worse than any new vice president in the history of polling,” wrote Scher.

The Real Clear Politics average for Vance’s favorability currently sits at 41.7% favorable to 44.8% unfavorable (a net favorable rating of -3.1 percentage points), but it gets “even more underwater” when one just looks at the polling after the Zelensky meeting at the end of February, with Vance’s in a -5.6 percentage point hole (42.4% favorable to 48% unfavorable).

His Real Clear Politics favorable-unfavorable rating is 41.7 percent-44.8 percent, a slightly worse net favorable rating (-3.1 percentage points) than Donald Trump’s (-0.9). When looking only at March polling—sampled after his infamous Oval Office hectoring of Ukraine’s president—he’s even more underwater: 42.4 percent-48.0 percent. In comparison, as Scher noted, Harris’s average RCP favorability “seldom cracked 50 percent,” but she did spend almost a year-and-a-half with her numbers solidly on the positive side, and in March 2021 even had a string of polls where she was in the black by 10, 11, even 17 points.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney coasted along with favorability numbers over 60% in Gallup polling for two-and-a-half years, then saw his numbers drop. Similarly, Joe Biden started his first term as Barack Obama’s vice president with Gallup’s poll scoring him at 53% favorable and 29% unfavorable, sliding down to 42% and 40%, respectively, in November 2009 as Great Recession woes dragged down Americans’ views of the White House, and Pew rating him as 63% and 20% in January 2009 and 50% to 29% that November.

Trump’s first number two, former Vice President Mike Pence, had basically a stagnant tie for his favorable vs. unfavorable numbers for his first two years, with both numbers in the low 40s. Pence also frequently polled slightly above Trump, whereas Vance lags a bit behind him.

Scher pointed out that both former veeps Dan Quayle and Al Gore were in office “in the pre-Internet era” and got a higher number of poll respondents who said they were “undecided” or “didn’t know enough” about them to evaluate their favorability. “Nevertheless, Gore started fairly strongly with a 36 percent-7 percent favorable-unfavorable rating,” wrote Scher. “Quayle, who was tagged as an intellectual lightweight when he joined the 1988 Republican ticket, started underwater at 19 percent-23 percent and didn’t improve.”

Quayle has the favorability gap closest to Vance’s, but Vance’s March numbers dragged him down further and he’s much better known to the poll respondents, meaning Vance’s polling numbers are more likely to be indicative of how voters in a hypothetical presidential primary might view him.

Only two vice presidents in the modern era weren’t able to secure their party’s presidential nomination, wrote Scher: Quayle and Pence, and “Vance could easily be the third.”

With Trump so publicly keeping his powder dry for the upcoming 2028 election, even if Trump Jr. doesn’t run, Vance can’t count on a Truth Social post with Trump’s “Complete and Total Endorsement” to secure the MAGA base, so would need “poll numbers so stellar that the electability argument could not be denied” to get through a primary battle, Scher concluded. Instead, Vance “starts from a very weak place.”

Musk’s domineering presence at Trump’s inauguration and Cabinet meetings suggests he may continue to be an obstacle for Vance to establish his own legacy, so Vance will be left with little to show GOP voters except an honorable but short and unremarkable stint as a military journalist in the Marine Corps, an also short private sector career working for venture capitalists like Peter Thiel, a bestselling memoir with a message that he’s largely abandoned, and a pitifully thin record from his few months in the Senate.

As I wrote last October, “Vance is essentially the Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) of the Senate, stomping and shouting but getting nothing done.”