IF VANCE DOESN'T GET THE 2028 NOMINATION, IT WILL BE BECAUSE HE WAS SHIVVED BY GOP ELITES, NOT THE RANK-AND-FILE

Most of you believe that no one likes J.D. Vance, but in the months leading up to the midterms he consistently led in polls of the 2028 Republican presidential field, usually by double digits. You might say that's just name recognition, but he's beating possible candidates who are equally well known -- Marco Rubio, Tucker Carlson, Robert Kennedy Jr., Ron DeSantis. One poll, conducted just before Election Day by the quirky but often accurate Brazilian firm AtlasIntel, showed Rubio with a 13-point lead, but Vance has been leading the pack otherwise, with a 12-point lead in the Real Clear Polling average.

So it seems as if Republican voters like Vance enough. But he might be defeated anyway, because of a campaign against him by (some) Republican elites.

Media Matters reports today:

Fox & Friends, the Fox News morning show ... is emerging as the nexus of an “anybody but JD Vance” campaign for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination.

Co-hosts Brian Kilmeade, Ainsley Earhardt, Lawrence Jones, and their guests have spent the days since the GOP’s crushing midterms defeat savaging the vice president’s presumed forthcoming effort to succeed Trump — and propping up alternative candidates, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Secretary of State Marco Rubio....

Kilmeade, the longest-tenured resident of Fox & Friends’ Curvy Couch ... is also the loudest and most consistent critic of Vance’s potential bid for the GOP nomination. An Iran hawk who urged on Trump’s decision to launch U.S. military strikes on the country and has repeatedly called for risky escalations over the months since, Kilmeade has argued that Vance’s summer diplomacy prevented U.S. victory and thus led to the Republican election defeats.

But Earhardt and Jones have also been quick to argue that the nomination should not be a coronation and to praise Vance’s potential competitors.

There is, of course, a network of elites supporting Vance -- but please note that the New York Times opinion section recently gave column inches to right-wing influencer Erick Erickson's denunciation of "weirdos" in the GOP, many of whom are in Vance's orbit:

Consider how some of its leading lights spent the month before the election. For four consecutive Mondays, Peter Thiel, a billionaire, lectured on the Antichrist at a Masonic lodge in Nashville. The sessions drew William Wolfe, Andrew Isker and Joshua Haymes, prominent Christian nationalists....

Some of the funding behind this movement comes from Charles Haywood, who made his fortune selling a shampoo company. Mr. Haywood has written that his preferred government “will not be democratic,” that women “will not be permitted to choose career over family” and that men “will not be permitted to choose not to have a family” without “significant penalties.” ... His foundation ... has funded ... American Moment, a government staffing pipeline founded with JD Vance’s support....

This group is invested in the future of Vice President JD Vance as the agent of the change they want. At a National Conservatism conference in Jerusalem, which happened to be held on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre, Mr. Wolfe said that “JD Vance is our guy.” According to Rod Dreher, he also suggested that conservative American Jews should know their place.... Mr. Vance has not put any real distance between himself and the weirdo right.

And while Bret Stephens, the most prominent right-wing columnist at the Times, isn't perceived by the GOP base as a Republican in good standing, I wonder if he speaks for many of the party's elites. Today he writes:

JD Vance, America’s loutish vice president, has a theory of the Republican rout in last week’s midterms. As he explained in a lengthy social media post the day after the elections, voters who abandoned Donald Trump’s 2024 coalition in favor of Democrats could be won back if the G.O.P. did four things: ended the war with Iran; focused on inflation and the cost of living; “put America First”; and changed “our relationship to Israel.”

Translation: There are Jews out there to be blamed by imputation, implication, derivation and association.

And even this guy is criticizing Vance:

Rudolph W. Giuliani says Vice President J.D. Vance has a shot at taking President Trump’s place in 2028, but the former New York mayor has issues with the veep’s tendencies.

Speaking on his YouTube channel Thursday, the former Trump lawyer said about Mr. Vance, “I see presidential potential with you. ... I also see certain dangers in your personality that make you a dangerous possibility as president.” ...

Mr. Giuliani didn’t like that Mr. Vance seemingly wanted to throw in the towel on Iran over the election losses.

“It’s making me very, very nervous that a country is burning effigies of you and your president and your two envoys,” Mr. Giuliani said of the Islamic regime, “threatening to kill them, not just episodically, but they’ve been threatening to kill them and all their predecessors for 48 years. And because we lost an election, you want to cave in.”

Maybe these are members of an old guard that will be vanquished by a pro-Vance army of technofascists, Substack pseudointellectuals, and young groypers.

But if Vance is brought down, it might be by this old guard, which still believes in interventionism on behalf of the Gulf states and Israel, and doesn't seem to trust the addle-brained tech elite or doughy young message-board hatemongers.

I don't think Democrats will be able to sustain their current high over the next two years of attempting to govern while butting heads with an aging but still bellicose Donald Trump, so I'll be happy if Republicans are fighting viciously among themselves over the next two years. Fingers crossed!