From J.D. Vance’s appearance last night on Tucker Carlson Tonight Vance has just said that the donor elites of the GOP are out of touch with the party’s base. More:

CARLSON: But more broadly, what you are saying, I think is, that the Democratic Party understands what it is and who it represents and affirmatively represents them. They do things for their voters, but the Republican Party doesn’t actually represent its own voters very well.

VANCE: Yes, that’s exactly right. I mean, look at who the Democratic Party is and look, I don’t like the Democratic Party’s policies.

CARLSON: Yes.

VANCE: Most of the times, I disagree with them. But I at least admire that they recognize who their voters are and they actually just as raw cynical politics do a lot of things to serve those voters.

Now, look at who Republican voters increasingly are. They are people who disproportionately serve in the military, but Republican foreign policy has been a disaster for a lot of veterans. They are disproportionately folks who want to have more children. They are people who want to have more single earner families. They are people who don’t necessarily want to go to college but they want to work in an economy where if you play by the rules, you can you actually support a family on one income.

CARLSON: Yes.

VANCE: Have Republicans done anything for those people really in the last 15 or 20 years? I think can you point to some policies of the Trump administration. Certainly, instinctively, I think the President gets who his voters are and what he has to do to service those folks. But at the end of the day, the broad elite of the party, the folks who really call the shots, the think tank intellectuals, the people who write the policy, I just don’t think they realize who their own voters are.

Now, the slightly more worrying implication is that maybe some of them do realize who their voters are, they just don’t actually like those voters much.

CARLSON: Well, that’s it. So I watch the Democratic Party and I notice that if there is a substantial block within it, it’s this unstable coalition, all of these groups have nothing in common, but the one thing they have in common is the Democratic Party will protect them.

VANCE: Yes.

CARLSON: You criticize a block of Democratic Voters and they are on you like a wounded wombat. They will bite you. The Republicans, watch their voters come under attack and sort of nod in agreement, “Yes, these people should be attacked.”

VANCE: Yes, that’s absolutely right. I mean, if you talk to people who spent their lives in D.C. I know you live in D.C.

CARLSON: Yes.

VANCE: I’ve spent a lot of my life here. The people who spend their time in D.C. who work on Republican campaigns, who work at conservative think tanks, now this isn’t true of everybody, but a lot of them actually don’t like the people who are voting for Republican candidates these days.

 

Read or watch the whole thing here.

Want to hear more of this? Come to TAC’s 2019 Gala in Washington. J.D. Vance will be the keynote speaker. You want to see and hear and meet the man who I believe will be the standard-bearer tomorrow’s conservatism? Buy a ticket. We’ll be glad to see you.