MILWAUKEE — The delegates here at the Republican National Convention are not a tough crowd when it comes to Donald Trump. They’re instinctively impressed by just about anything the former president does. But they were particularly impressed by his pick for vice president on Monday — so much so that Sen. J.D. Vance is already being talked about as the next GOP presidential nominee.
“He’s someone that’s young and can carry a lot of that sort of America First, MAGA momentum into the future,” Donald Trump Jr. told NOTUS, “so we don’t just revert sort of back to a neocon, RINO nonsense that we’ve been dealing with for a while.”
Trump Jr. — the former president’s oldest son — has been a prominent Vance advocate. He was essential in getting his father to endorse Vance in the 2022 GOP primary, which pushed him over the edge in a crowded field of Senate candidates. But Vance has also been a favorite among the most MAGA Republicans out there, yet another indication that Trump is leaning into his reddest instincts rather than trying to temper himself.
A little after 5 p.m., Vance became the vice presidential nominee “by acclamation,” with raucous applause on the convention floor.
Vance, of course, was a favored pick among one particular constituency on Monday: Ohio Republicans.
“It couldn’t have been a better pick,” Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno told NOTUS. “J.D. Vance is a great, great human being. Proud to have him as a friend. And he’s gonna make an amazing, amazing vice president.”
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine also celebrated the pick as a symbol of the state’s growing influence.
“To have the vice president from the state of Ohio, it’s great,” DeWine said. “It happens to coincide with the resurgence of the state of Ohio. You know, we’re creating more jobs every day than we have people to fill those jobs. So we’re moving forward now.”
If Trump is elected president, Vance would become the first senator to become vice president from Ohio (if you don’t count Indiana Sen. Charles Fairbanks, who was originally born in Ohio and served as Teddy Roosevelt’s vice president).
Either way, delegates at the Republican National Convention approved of the pick, looking ahead to a future Republican Party with Vance at the helm.
“He knows that Vance will have his back,” said Alabama delegate Sherry Hyche. “When the economy picks back up, we’ve got Vance for eight more years hopefully.”
“He’s the one I was hoping it’’d be the whole time,” said Janis Holt, a Texas delegate. “He’s going to pick up the mantle from Trump in four years and take us for another eight years.”
And Kip Christianson, a 33-year-old Minnesota delegate, said he had been following Vance for the past 10 years. He thinks Vance speaks to a younger generation of Republicans.
“I think he understands my people. I think he understands me, and I think he represents for a younger generation of America what Donald Trump represented for an older generation of America in 2016,” Christianson told NOTUS.
He believes Vance is the person best suited to carry the torch into 2028 after Trump is term-limited out.
“He’s got a way to cut through to folks who are a lot like me but haven’t gotten on board yet,” he said. “And that’s very exciting to me.”
Trump announced his VP selection in a Truth Social post Monday afternoon. It followed growing speculation at the RNC that Trump would make a surprise pick — maybe Nikki Haley or Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin. But in the end, Trump went with Vance, perhaps the least surprising pick and the candidate perhaps most aligned with Trump’s brand of conservatism.
Vance, 39, was only elected to the Senate in 2022. But his experience, or lack thereof, seemed less of an issue for Trump, who never held public office before he was elected president in 2016, and potentially more of an asset.
“My father had zero political experience. He led us to peace deals in the Middle East,” said Trump Jr., who is also a potential candidate to pick up the MAGA mantle and run for president. “If experience is a marker for Washington, D.C., politics, it’s a bad one.”
If that’s the attitude of most Republicans, Vance will be a popular pick — just as he was a popular pick on the convention floor.
Of course, not every delegate in Milwaukee was delighted by the selection.
“I would personally be happier with Haley,” said Jim Walsh, an alternate delegate from Connecticut, adding that he’d rather it be a candidate with more diversity to broaden Trump’s appeal.
“If you tried to think of it with strategy, you would think that he wouldn’t want to lose a sitting senator,” said Pennsylvania delegate Jim Vasilko, who said he was otherwise happy with the selection.
Reports trickled in early Monday that Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. Doug Burgum, two other VP front-runners, had been told by the Trump campaign that they would not be selected.
When asked about Vance, several delegates simply deferred to Trump.
“He wouldn’t be my first choice, but whatever the president wishes,” Rick Pate, an Alabama delegate and the state’s agriculture commissioner, said. “Kamala Harris has shown how unimportant that job is.”
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Ben T.N. Mause is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow, and Reese Gorman is a reporter at NOTUS.