Can a Bannon-Groyper Alliance Derail Vance?
Description
JD Vance is likely to be the 2028 Republican nominee. Betting markets give him about a 50% chance, and I would recommend buying at that price.
In forecasting, the first thing you usually do is look at base rates. Here, the relevant question is, when a vice president runs after serving under a two-term president, how often does he get the nomination?
In the last hundred years, we’ve had four such cases:
Nixon in 1960 (and again in 1968), after Eisenhower (1953-1961)
George H.W. Bush in 1988, after Reagan (1981-1989)
Gore in 2000, after Clinton (1993-2001)
Biden in 2020, after Obama (2009-2017)
In each of these situations, the current or former vice president won his party’s nomination. This alone gets you to at least 50% odds, even with the small sample size, using a generous threshold of statistical significance. The further back we look the more questionable the relevance of the data becomes. Still, you have to go all the way back to Charles Fairbanks’ failed 1916 campaign to see a break with the pattern.
Moreover, Vance has even more going for him than the typical VP of a two-term president. Trump’s cult-like grip on the Republican Party gives him a lot of say regarding who his successor will be. I don’t expect Vance to end up like Mike Pence, because I can’t imagine a scenario in which Vance stands up to his boss. He appears to have recast all of his views and even adjusted his personality in the service of playing the subservient role to Trump.
Vance also has a good relationship with Elon Musk, so much so that the former DOGE-king is considering shelving his new political party in order to maintain their alliance and remain influential on the Republican side into 2028 and beyond.
Given all of this, anyone who is not starting out with Vance as the presumptive favorite is not seeing the world accurately. But it’s worth thinking about what might derail his nomination, partly as an exercise in figuring out what the post-Trump GOP will look like.
The Based Arc of Conservatism
The way I see it, for Vance to lose you need the introduction of some kind of wild card. This is what makes the anti-Vance attacks that have popped up in recent weeks so intriguing.
There seems to be one influential constituency in the Republican Party that is unhappy with Vance. I’m of course talking about the Groypers. Don’t laugh! The entire history of politics over the last twenty years is people going “Come on, that’s just an internet phenomenon,” and then we wake up one day and again learn that the internet is where real life happens now. We’ve seen this pattern with woke, the alt right, gender identity on Tumblr, etc. The Groypers themselves have already had an influence on mainstream politics, having made it practically impossible for Republican influencers to be friendly even to legal immigration.
For those who are unaware, Groypers are followers of Nick Fuentes who prioritize identity issues. They believe Jews have too much influence in America and emphasize the need to oppose Israel. They also are racist in the classic sense, talking about group differences in crime and IQ and all that, but are less passionate about blacks than Jews. There are also theocratic Catholic and incel elements. So a weird combination, that is kind of like the Trump movement itself in being shaped by the eccentricities of its leader.
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The story of the 2019 “Groyper War” is instructive here. Followers of Fuentes would ambush mainstream conservative figures, most notably Charlie Kirk at Turning Point USA events, and pepper them with questions about topics like immigration and Israel. Kirk, who had once openly supported legal immigration and “stapling green cards to diplomas,” shifted toward a harder line, demonstrating how a fringe online movement could bully one of the GOP’s most connected influencers into changing his tune.
The Groyper War was in compressed form a demonstration of what has happened on the right more generally. Weird internet subcultures have shown that they can transfer their energy into real-world leverage over the broader conservative movement. Fuentes’ followers lacked institutional power, but they could humiliate establishment conservatives online, generate viral moments, and move the conversation in their direction.
Few Republican stances have seemed more solid than being pro-Israel, with the Trump administration deporting people for writing the wrong op-eds and refraining from putting pressure on the Netanyahu government over what is happening in Gaza. Yet support for Israel is dropping among young Republicans. Marjorie Taylor Greene now puts out long rants attacking Netanyahu on Twitter, and Megyn Kelly, a relatively mainstream figure, suggests Jeffrey Epstein might have been connected to Mossad during a TPUSA conference. Her YouTube channel includes a recent clip with the title “Megyn Kelly and Charlie Kirk Push Back Against Israel Supporters Demanding Their 100% Israel Support.” Seems like baby steps, but if you watch the discourse, you know that more mainstream figures did not talk like this three years ago.
I think the way to understand modern conservatism now is as a dialectic in which the arc of the discourse bends towards Based. On immigration, we went from a consensus against illegals, to a complete consensus among major right-wing influencers against legal immigration. Discourse about white people being the only true Americans has become normalized. There’s also been a move towards conspiratorial thinking, with the Epstein issue dominating the aforementioned recent TPUSA conference. We now have a member of Congress whose public profile revolves around promising to release various “files” hiding nefarious government actions on topics like UFOs, the Kennedy assassination, and Martin Luther King.
In this environment, it is unrealistic to think that the taboo on antisemitism will be the one to hold. I don’t expect most Republican presidential candidates to openly talk about the “Jewish question” in 2028, but they will be increasingly friendly to those that do, and dogwhistle to them when they can on issues like Epstein and Israel. Supporters of the Jewish state in Washington have done a good job of holding onto positions of influence at the upper reaches of the GOP even as the ground under the
United States
