Vance is the worst VP candidate ever – and it’s not even close

That’s it, folks, I’m calling it: Let it be known, in September of the year 2024, that JD Vance ‒ aka “The Bearded Weird” ‒ is officially the worst vice presidential candidate pick in all of U.S. history.
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, please turn in your crown. Vance will accept it while saying something unfunny that makes normal people feel uncomfortable. It’s kind of his thing.
With a seemingly endless stream of “previous podcast appearances” in which he speaks of women as faceless baby pods and with ongoing public appearances that show him struggling with the basics of human interaction, Vance has proved himself almost staggeringly unlikable.
He’s the guy nobody wants to get stuck next to at the office party. Or at the bar. Or in the grocery store line. Or anywhere, really.
Oozing whatever is the opposite of charisma, Vance has been booed at a firefighters union meeting, excoriated for past comments about America being run by “childless cat ladies” and mercilessly dragged online for video of a painfully awkward exchange at a Georgia doughnut shop.
He is, it’s worth remembering, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s VP pick only because Trump’s previous vice president, Mike Pence, now refuses to endorse him. Vance is a replacement-Pence, which is the saddest thing a person can be.
I, and I suspect many other Americans, would usually feel empathy for a person so flabbergastingly awkward. But there’s an empathy-eviscerating meanness at the core of Vance’s character. So here we are.
The 538 polling average presently has Vance’s favorability so far underwater that he needs scuba gear, with 44.4% of people having an unfavorable opinion of him and only 33.9% approving. 
An ABC News/Ipsos poll released Sunday has his favorability at -12%.
The Democratic vice presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has an impressive +11% favorability rating in the same poll, and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is at +3%.  
Will Trump and Harris debate?Donald Trump’s 10 very specific demands for a debate with Kamala Harris, probably.
Trump is at a sad-trombone-worthy -25% favorability. Hopefully part of that comes from Americans annoyed at him for forcing them to be exposed to Vance in the first place.
That Vance has somehow out-Palin-ed Sarah Palin is nothing short of remarkable.
For those fortunate enough to have forgotten or never heard of her, Palin was … a lot. Republican presidential candidate John McCain picked her as his running mate in 2008. She quickly turned Americans off with her mean and fact-averse version of folksiness and revealed herself as little more than a reality television contestant in search of a low-rated show.
Running neck-and-neck with Palin in the “Ooof, that was a bad VP pick” category is former Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine, who was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate. His exciting-as-a-jar-of-generic-mayonnaise personality added zero value to the ticket that eventually lost to Trump.
That was then, and this is now. I imagine Kaine and Palin will soon meet at a neutral Applebee’s to hoist a beer in celebration of Vance’s pitifulness.
Recently, ABC News reported this: “We applied our current favorability polling average formula to old polls of six freshly minted VP picks from the past 20 years … and none of them ever had an average net favorability rating as low as Vance’s.”
One reason for that might be all the incomprehensibly weird things Vance said in the recent past when he apparently spent most of his time appearing on podcasts.
Over the weekend, The Guardian found a Vance clip from a 2021 podcast for a conservative group called “America Moment.” In it, Vance said women who opt to focus on their careers rather than having children are choosing “a path to misery.”
At one point, he presents his version of the perspective of such a woman, saying: “OK, clearly, this value set has made me a miserable person who can’t have kids because I already passed the biological period when it was possible. … But I’m really better than these other people. What I’m going to do is project my, like, racial and gender sensitivities on the rest of them … even though the way that I think has made me a miserable person, I just need to make more people think like that.”
That’s a fairly smack-able thing to say. And it demonstrates Vance’s unique skill of sounding smug, sexist, faux intellectual, lonely, tragic and dumb all at once.
The GOP’s problem with women:You’re not imagining it. Republicans have been weird about women for years.
He has been asked if he’d like to apologize for offensive past comments, but he won’t. Admitting any form of wrongdoing in Trump’s MAGA universe is strictly forbidden.
Last Thursday, the never-hilarious Vance posted a video on social media along with these words: “I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview.” The video was of 2007 Miss Teen USA contestant Caite Upton struggling painfully to answer a question during the competition.
That moment haunted Upton and led her to have suicidal thoughts. So … you know … not funny.
When Vance was asked on CNN if he wanted to apologize to Upton, Capt. Smooth said: “I’m not going to apologize for posting a joke.”
You’re a joke, Mr. Vance. And, fittingly, an unfunny one.
Palin and Kaine had cringe-inducing moments, but they were nothing compared with Vance’s ongoing streak of insufferableness. He’s every office’s “one guy nobody likes.” He’s a shining example of Trump’s inability to make smart decisions. He is best forgotten.
And it’s only the beginning of September.
Lord knows how many other podcast clips are out there.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on X, formerly Twitter, @RexHuppke and Facebook facebook.com/RexIsAJerk