Per week after President Barack Obama’s re-election in November 2012, JD Vance, then a law student at Yale, said wrote a devastating rebuke the Republican Party’s attitude towards immigrants and minorities, criticising it for its “open hostility towards non-whites” and for the alienation of “blacks, Latinos, [and] the youth.”
Four years later, as Vance considered a career in GOP politics, he asked a former college professor to take down the article. That professor, Brad Nelson, had taught Vance at Ohio State University when he was an undergraduate. After graduating, Nelson asked him to contribute to a blog he ran for the nonpartisan Center for World Conflict and Peace.
Nelson told CNN that he agreed to delete the article at Vance's request during the 2016 Republican primary so that Vance could more easily get a job in Republican politics. However, the article, titled “A Blueprint for the GOP,” remains available on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
“A key part of Republican immigration policy revolves around the ability to deport 12 million people (or deport themselves),” Vance wrote. “Think about it: We conservatives (rightly) distrust the government when it comes to efficiently managing corporate loans and regulating our food supply, and yet we supposedly believe it can deport millions of undocumented aliens. That notion is simply ridiculous. The same is true of too many parts of the party platform.”
Twelve years later, as former President Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate, Vance espouses many of the same anti-immigration sentiments he criticized as a 28-year-old law student in 2012. In recent days, Vance has increased without reason Claims against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
But asked on Sunday Regarding his previous criticism of Trump's stance on immigration, Vance argued that Trump's rhetoric on immigration was actually the reason he turned from a Trump critic to a Trump supporter.
“The reason I changed my mind about Donald Trump is made clear by what happened in Springfield,” Vance said. “The media and the Kamala Harris campaign have been calling the people of Springfield racists and lying about them. They've said they made up these reports about migrants eating geese, and they're completely ignoring the health catastrophe that's unfolding in Springfield right now. You know who hasn't ignored that? Donald Trump.”
Will Martin, a spokesman for Vance, told CNN that Vance has long supported tough border security measures, including deportations, and now has one of the most conservative voting records in the Senate. He said his views on deportations have changed since the time of the blog post.
“There is nothing strange about the fact that Senator Vance's views on certain issues have changed since his twenties, like those of millions of Americans,” Martin said in an email to CNN.
Vance’s previous anti-Trump rhetoric is well known, as he was a vocal critic the former president during much of Trump's first year in office. And although Vance defended many of his supporters, he wrote on Facebook in 2016: “There are undoubtedly vile racists at the core of Trump's movement.”
Nelson, who was very positive about Vance in messages to CNN and called him one of his brightest students, said Vance's post “caused some excitement among some campaign teams that Vance had considered working for.”
“I was a little surprised at the backlash he apparently received from the GOP, as I thought his post was pretty innocuous,” Nelson told CNN. “Anyway, I liked JD and wanted to help him, so I deleted his post.”
“He gave no indication that his opinion on the issues he wrote about in his post had changed,” Nelson added in messages to CNN.
CNN found the article about X where he was mentioned from the think tank in 2012.
Two more blog posts Vance wrote for the site, are still active, but CNN noted that the “Blueprint” article has been removed from the site. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, where the post was stored, shows that it was published sometime between March 2014 and February 2016.
“Only attractive to white people”
Vance began his article with a scathing critique of Republican strategies and candidates, which he blamed for the party's failures within the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.
“When the 2008 election was called for Obama, I assumed: Maybe my party can learn some very vital lessons from this,” Vance wrote. “You can't nominate people like Sarah Palin who alienate swing voters. You can't actively alienate every growing block of the American electorate – blacks, Latinos, youth – and you possibly can't rely solely on the one shrinking block of the electorate – whites. And yet, 4 years later, I’m forced to reassess a few party that nominated the worst people like Richard Mourdock and tried to win an election by appealing only to whites.”
In the article, which Nelson asked to be removed, Vance argued that the Republican Party would be in trouble if it did not adapt to the country's changing demographics. He criticized the GOP's adherence to supply-side politics, comparing it to support for outdated policies such as Soviet containment. He said that during the Bush years, this approach to the economy led to stagnant wages and concentrated growth, alienating minority voters who found Democratic policies more relevant and appealing.
“Republicans are losing minority voters for easy and obvious reasons: their policy proposals are trite, unoriginal, or openly hostile to non-whites,” Vance wrote.
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