Why JD Vance might be Reagan’s real Republican heir

“Saturday Night Live” joined in the Tim Walz pile-on this weekend, mocking the Minnesota governor’s disastrous debate performance.

The vice presidential debate won’t affect the election’s outcome very much, though. Indeed, it has mostly dropped from d🤡iscussion owing to events at home and♔ abroad.

But that doesn’t m🍌ean it won’t have lasting impact. JD Vance’s p💖erformance was so compelling that it has immediately marked him as the next potential great force in national politics.

Vance’s f❀avorability rose more and his unfavorability dropped more among than 𒀰Walz’s did.

That’s not what most pundits predicted.

Those who knew the Ohio senꦫator only from his recent past thought he would be pugnacious and base-focused lᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚike Donald Trump.

Others who knew him only from the media-driven accounts of his off-the-cuff provocative staꦏtements expected 🔯him to be flippant, ignorant or primed to shock rather than persuade.

Those of us who knew him ꧒better, though, knew better.

We knew Vanceꦐ is a sharply articulate and intelligent man who could think on his feet. We also knew he’s focused on average Amer☂icans, not just the Trumpian MAGA base.

That’s the Vance the nation saw last week.

He was polite, temperate 🦩and principled rather than ideological. He could answer a question without recourse to memorized lines or talking points, unlike his increasingly flustered opponent, Walz.

Vance in short was stylistically a throwback to an earlier era of intelligence and manners while substantively someone very m🍬uch in tune with the concerns of conservatives and inde▨pendents open to a new politics of prudential problem-solving.

This was a ma♔n who could confound the so-called moderators rather than the other way around. Someone who could walk, talk and chew gum at the same time.

Someone who, if he handles himself well overಌ the next few years, could produce the conservative-populist realignment that has 📖been the low-hanging fruit of politics for more than a decade.

That realignment builds on the working-class constituency Trump has attracted but moves beyond that. It is infused by conservative ideas of liberty, family, faith aꦡnd patriotism without reducing them to the ideological caricatures too many Republicans peddle.

It’s one the moderate Latino construction worker or checkout clerk can agree with ever𝓀y bit as much as the moderate suburban soccer mom.

In Vance’s hands, conservative populism isn’t 🍷a paean for a forgotten past or a cudgel with which to hammer liberals and progressives. It’s a national banquet at which all citizens can feast.

He’s going to have to keep maturing as a politician fo⛄r this to transpire. That means increasing his ability to weave conservativ🍌e themes into mass appeals while simultaneously reassuring the base.

That means mastering foreign policy intricacies as much as he already understands domestic policy details. It means making clear one can be of strong faith without demanding ༺that all who follow him share that faith.

The proof will be in the pudding, and there will be inevitable stumbles. But that’s just sayin🎐g Vance — li💧ke Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan and every other transformative national leader — is human.

The establishment, right and left, won’t see this com🎃ing. Blinded by their ideologies, th🐼ey will see Vance as someone who’s too extreme or too callow to win.

They’ll remain wedded to their base-driven politics, a politics that emphasizes stokin🐠g the fires of old hatreds to maximize base turnout.

But that’s what Americans don’t want. The partisan registrati𝐆on f꧙igures are making that clear in spades.

For eight years the national media have painted Republicans as un-American authoritarians and Democrats as the only true rep🌳resentatives of the American ideal.

The result? The share of people saying they’re Democrats i꧃s down, as is the Democratic share of partisan registration in states requ🥃iring that.

Republicans have painted Democrats as un-Ame♌rican elites driven to tyrannize the average person. GOP partisan ID has barely increased, and its share of partisan registration is in most places only slightly up.

Instead, Americans are identifying themselves, to pollsters and 🅷on voter registration forms, as independents. They may lean toward one party or another as the old political battles unfold. But they want something new that takes the best of both sides.

That’s what Vance tantalizingly offered the nation in the debate. Imagine what he cou𒁃ld offer if he were the nominee, untethered to Trump.

The 50-50 national po🔯litics of the last 30 years is a historical anomaly. American politics is typically governed by one dominant party that forces the other to compete on its ground if it wants power.

That🙈 party was the Democrats🍃 between 1932 and 1984. Ronald Reagan brought the two parties into rough parity, but neither his GOP successors nor his Democratic counterparts have been able to break the deadlock.

The Vance we saw in the debate can do that. He can become the GOP’s FDR, completing R🌺eagan’s project of making the Republican Party America’s natural, working-class-dominated, governing party.

If that happens, we’ll look ba🍷c💛k on the debate as the moment Vance truly stepped onto the national stage. He went on as Trump’s understudy, but he came back as a star.

Henry Olsen, a political analyst and commentator, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.