Vanguard Vance: Trump deputy preempts Harris in key battleground states

Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, scheduled a flurry of campaign stops this week in critical battleground states, all of which have one key element in common: they come the same day as Vice President Kamala Harris’s own planned stops in the same towns.

The Republican vice presidential nominee appeared in Philadelphia on Wednesday, speaking hours before Harris was set to held a rally with her newly-minted running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn. His Wednesday schedule will feature appearances in a Detroit suburb and at a later event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Harris is set to appear in both cities the same day. On Thursday Vance was set to appear in Raleigh, N.C., again, on the same day as Harris, though he delayed that appearance due to severe weather.

Many of Harris’s own campaign stops will target key battleground states in the Rust Belt, among them Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Vance, an Ohio native, has often spoken to the specific socio-economic issues facing that region.

“JD Vance, the perfect guy to do this, talks about the decline in small town America and the Rust Belt, because, you know, jobs are shipped overseas and the fact that, yes, items you get might be a little cheaper, but the cost of dealing with entire communities that are falling apart, and are on drugs… nobody saved any money,” Trafalgar pollster Robert Cahaly said last week on the “John Solomon Reports” podcast. “It just got passed to the government to pay the bill. And so when he's talking about that, I think he is really effective.”

Vance’s own flurry of appearances comes as the Harris campaign mocked Trump’s campaign schedule as “low energy” this week, referencing a pejorative quip he once used against former Gov. Jeb Bush, R-Fla., The Hill reported. The Trump campaign has rebuffed claims that the former president’s schedule is light. But ahead of a planned rally in Montana on Friday, Vance has stood at the forefront.

Trump tapped Vance to serve as his running mate just weeks ago, naming him amid the Republican National Convention, saying “will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond.” The Hillbilly Elegy author in his acceptance speech spoke to the small American towns that had been left behind by the economic trends of the past several decades, recounting the experience of his own small town, which he called a “place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America's ruling class.”

While Harris had been a presumptive member of the Democratic ticket when President Joe Biden was still in the race, her ascent as the party’s nominee has seen her significantly expand her own campaign appearances, although none of those appearances have been unscripted or off-teleprompter. Vance appears to have found his stride in speaking to the human cost of the Biden administration’s policies.

Such an approach was on full display at his Philadelphia rally on Tuesday, in which he largely addressed the impact of the southern border crisis and the opioid epidemic on both inner city populations and those of rural America.

“You've got children who have been orphaned, who've been bouncing around foster homes, because Kamala Harris's policies allow this terrible fentanyl into our country, that orphaned these poor kids,” he said. “And you've got parents who have lost loved ones, who have lost children, because we keep on allowing the Mexican drug cartels to turn our country into a drug trafficking zone.”

Vance subsequently invited attendees to speak to the loss of their children to drugs and crime in the major American cities. One couple recounted the death of their daughter to fentanyl, while another woman spoke of her brother’s struggle with drug addiction and the lack of public safety in Philadelphia.

The Pew Charitable Trusts noted that while Philadelphia's crime rate overall dipped in 2024, the opioid epidemic remains a "massive hurdle for residents" and that "Among the nine cities that The Pew Charitable Trusts has long used for comparison in its ‘State of the City’ reports, Philadelphia had the highest rate of drug overdose deaths: 78.9 for every 100,000 residents."

“It's tough not to admire the courage of the two families behind me, but I have to ask, why is it necessary? Why are they suffering?” Vance later said. “And the answer is, because we have a leadership that is failing them.”

Vance then related his own familial struggle with the issue, saying “I remember when my own mom struggled with addiction, and my grandmother raised me for a big chunk of my early life, and I remember, after one particularly bad overdose, sitting beside her bed and being just angry that mom had taken this stuff to begin with, but then just desperately hoping and praying, ‘Jesus, please let her wake up from this.’”

“And that's what addiction does to our families. It sort of combines this incredible frustration, but also we still love the people who suffer, and we still want them to get better, even when we're frustrated when they take a wrong turn,” he went on. “But what I got with my mom, who's been clean and sober for nearly 10 years now. Thank you.”

After his planned remarks, Vance addressed reporter questions about Walz’s potential to appeal to white working class voters, whom the Ohio lawmaker has sought to energize.

“I'm skeptical that whoever the VP nominee is, most people are voting at the top of the ticket,” he said. “Tim Walz is a guy who wants to ship more and more American manufacturing jobs to China… This is a guy who, when rioters were burning down, the biggest city in Minnesota, was actively cheering them on.” For her part, Harris took to then-Twitter to raise bail money for the rioters. 

“The biggest problem with the Tim Walz pick, it's not Tim Walz himself,” Vance added. “It's what it says about Kamala Harris, that when given an opportunity, she will bend the knee to the most radical elements of her party. That's exactly what she did here.”

Just the News has sought comment from the Trump campaign.

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on X.