Are there enough incels to elect JD Vance?

The Shillbilly's misogyny isn't about voters. It's part of an attack on democracy that could make him president.

One could easily believe that JD Vance is the Universe’s way of teaching us the new ways the far right has invented to despise women.

Thanks to increasingly psychotic-feeling tryhard, we now know that the purpose of uteri and the people who carry them is either as a staging ground for childbirth or free post-menopausal childcare.

Leading with a guy who thinks his job is to scold women about the very issues every dude should shut the fuck up about might seem a bad idea for a presidential campaign, given how 2024 could be “the first election clearly decided by women.” 

Why pick a running mate destined, as Amanda Marcotte so brilliantly put it, “to appeal to men who have more opinions about women than conversations with them?” Other than the fact that you tried to have your fans break your old running mate’s neck on the Capital lawn.

One reason would be: what other option does Donald Trump have?

Divide and squander

Trump is the master of a strategy that uses strategic racism to divide America and allow corporate and fundamentalist interests that represent a fraction of the voters to dominate the country.

It’s effective! Far more effective than the more normie Republican approaches adopted by Mitt Romney and John McCain, but it doesn’t leave tons of room for growth with non-white Americans. And it makes it obvious that even when you’re pretending to appeal to non-white voters—by, say, questioning Kamala Harris’s Blackness—you’re just appealing to white voters.

So why not pick a JD Vance and go tanned balls out in pursuit of all the white dudes?

Well, verily I tell you, that’s the plan.

You don’t need to believe me when I confidently assert that JD Vance was picked to win over white males, especially around the Great Lakes, and just white males. Believe the Trump guys who leaked that exact message to a friendly reporter right around the time of the Republican National Convention:

“Trump wins white men in 2024 the way he did in 2016, he wins. There’s no question,” said an adviser to the Trump campaign on condition of anonymity…

Along the so-called Blue Wall—which Trump won narrowly in 2016 and lost narrowly in 2020—the white electorate dominates. Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are 84 percent white, 81 percent white, and 74 percent white, respectively, according to a Republican research firm surveying the states.

Trump world’s determination, ultimately, was that winning just one of those states would close off any path for Joe Biden—and that the best way to ensure that win was by maximizing the white male vote. Vance, who hails from Ohio and has built his political identity on white working-class populism, was chosen, in part, because the Trump team thought he would best play that role. 

If you were a MAGA-friendly reporter, you might believe this argument makes sense because Vance’s book was touted as the Rosetta Stone of understanding how Trump won over the white working class in 2016. That would make the junior Senator the key to winning over the so-called Rust Belt, if the opposite weren’t true.

Vance underperforms nearly any Republican you can imagine

We know this argument doesn’t make sense to voters in Ohio, an actual Great Lakes State, because we have actual evidence that it didn’t work in 2022:

Vance ultimately won by six points — a margin similar to Trump’s. But crucially, he underperformed every other statewide Republican on the ballot by a large margin. Ohio went strongly for Republicans; it did not go strongly for Vance.

Gov. Mike DeWine (R) won by 26 points; Attorney General Dave Yost (R) won by 20 points; Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) won by 19 points; and state Treasurer Robert Sprague (R) and Auditor Keith Faber (R) won by 18. The GOP’s Supreme Court nominees all won by double digits, too.

Of course, Vance was picked before Biden dropped out when the MAGA strategy of smearing Biden as a beta had succeeded beyond their own expectations, and the salience of abortion rights as an issue seemed likely to be drowned out by Biden’s own reluctance to engage the issue directly.

In a way, picking Vance to win over young white men at risk of alienating everyone else mirrors the left’s approach of leaning into abortion rights that helped Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, and Tony Evers get re-elected in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

So it’s worth asking: could this depravity work?

A nation of incels?

On Friday, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of Gamergate, and if you don’t know what that is, why can’t I be you? But if you do, you know it was the birth of a politics of aggressive and unrepentant white male domination that at least preceded MAGA, if not became it.

Around a decade ago, unfortunately, in large part due to a tragedy at my alma mater, we learned the term “incel,” which describes a dude who makes his whole identity about his inability to get sex, which is kind of the opposite of what I and every dude I knew growing up did.

We have a lot of information about the behavior of incels, thanks to a 2022 Secret Service case study. But I can’t find any numbers on how many of them actually exist or their status as swing voters. We know that Steve Bannon successfully targeted them in 2016— I suppose—and JD Vance clearly is targeting them now with his weirdo fixation on childbirth and his trad wife appeals that blur the line between Christo-fascism and pick-up artist culture.

Of course, Vance and the right aren’t just after the fringe that helps inspire their message; there is a very large and growing audience of dudes who listen to Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson and may think a guy who takes away everyone’s abortion rights while paying off two sex workers he had affairs with while his third wife was nursing his fifth kid is the bee’s knees.

Most Americans are in committed relationships and not actively pursuing incelanity, but I think is the chart I think most cheers Trump’s strategists:

The young voters will decide

I continue to insist that this election is still a coin flip because it’s still a coin flip around the Great Lakes.

That’s the strategy Paul Manafort figured out in 2016 (and shared with his Russian allies), which could still win this for Trump in 2024. And he doesn’t need to win all the Blue Wall states. One is enough, which is why Trump joked about just leaving JD Vance in Pennsylvania when he thought that might actually have helped him.

One message Barack Obama constantly leans into is that young voters will decide the direction of this country. And no one knows that better than him.

Biden’s weakness on Gaza and the mass disdain he picked up across youth culture for his inability or unwillingness to contain Netanyahu weakened his appeal to young people. Students are returning to school, and Netanyahu is likely to continue to do his worst for his country (and his best to elect Donald Trump) by destroying any hope of peace or the remaining hostages returning.

That will be a real challenge for Vice President Harris, who seems to be adjusting and sharpening her approach to the valid concerns of the “uncommitted” movement. That’s reality.

What’s more fictional is JD Vance’s appeal.

Vance has championed “Racist Theater”

Our MAGA-friendly reporter also noted that the Trump team likes the way Vance has thrown himself into Trump’s specific brand of dog-whistle politics.

They think he can sell it to the Millennials, like some outlet-store skinny jeans:

The 39-year-old Vance, Republicans believe, can provide a more polished version of Trumpism, but with the same overarching ideology. The senator has been at the vanguard of a Trump-inspired nationalist-populist intellectual movement often making the case in interviews with prominent journalists and magazine articles—media that Trump tends to avoid.

That doesn’t mean Vance shies away from race or dog whistles. In his first TV ad of his Senate race, Vance memorably asked: “Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans?” In the spot, he pointed to the camera, faulting President Biden’s immigration policies for allowing “more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”

This is the ad that inspired Ian Haney López, who wrote the book on Dog Whistle Politics, to call Vance “a real piece of shit.” But that doesn’t mean this sort of “Racist Theater,” Trump’s one real innovation to America’s long tradition of “The Southern Strategy,” can’t work. Indeed, it did once and nearly did a second time. Thanks to the electoral college, as the slavers intended.

And it could again because we on the left don’t get that Trump is inviting accusations that he’s racist to build solidarity among white voters:

It isn’t working, probably won’t, and doesn’t need to

But the truth is that Vance will never be as good at the “strategically dividing America by race for billionaires’ pleasure” game Trump has nearly perfected. And Trump is the candidate.

Any hypothetical young white male Vance picks up may be offset by the loss of a young woman, who is more likely to vote, or a young man who believes the way to win over the women they desire isn’t to insult the entire gender with insults that sound like they were written with calipers.

“I’m trying to do a focus group tonight with undecided voters under the age of 27 for a major news outlet,” Frank Luntz recently said. “And I can’t recruit young women to this because they don’t exist as undecided voters.”

And it’s important to say how much that pains Luntz, who often gets presented as an objective focus group leader but is actually one of the most nefarious influences in American politics ever, having mainstreamed Pat Buchanan’s white nationalism with poll-tested euphemisms.

Vance’s real target audience is rich freaks

The reality is that JD Vance’s ability to appeal to the public is almost non-existent.

His skill is winning over very rich dudes who see him, in their bubbled delusion, as representative of the sort of yokels they want to serve their domination.

He famously won over billionaire Peter Thiel—one of the triumvirate of Paypal anti-democratic immigrant billionaires with ties to Apartheid-era South Africa with Elon Musk and David Sacks—while a student at Yale. Thiel helped him win Trump’s support in the 2022 GOP primary for the US Senate in Ohio. Then his studied approach to winning over the far right and Peter Thiel's money, again, helped him win over Don Jr., AKA DonYoung, who helped him win over DonOld.

The freakish danger that Vance represents is difficult to convey or believe. It’s that scary. And it needs to be talked about a lot more since Trump is a coin flip from the presidency and closer to death than at least 99% of the people on earth.

Gil Duran has been covering the rise of tech authoritarianism for his Nerd Reich newsletter. It was one of America's most telling and undercovered stories before these Bitcoin-loving and democracy-hating freaks merged with MAGA in the pick of Vance.

“The tech billionaires behind Trump already have money,” Duran wrote. “Now they want power – to create their own countries, to change what it means to be human, to control the fate of the world. Their interest is mainly ideological, not economic. Anyone saying otherwise has not done the reading.”

Vance is weird. His backers are weird. And their agenda is barely comprehensible in terms of ordinary American politics. And that’s why Vance is on the ballot.

The purpose of JD Vance isn’t to win over a single voter. It’s to let the most aggressive enemies of freedom know how sincere Trump is, not just about implementing the dark vision of Project 2025 but also using technology to reorder the world.

They want a “Network State” where people like JD Vance don’t need to appeal to anyone but billionaires who get to decide what—if any—role that average people like us in a society designed just for them and the people who kiss their asses.

And they could get it.

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