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JD Vance once admitted that there were “definitely some people” who voted for Donald Trump who were racist and had voted for the former president “for racist reasons” in 2016.
Vance said in a newly resurfaced interview that race was “a constant fact” of American life but it had not been a driving factor behind Trump’s victory.
The clip is the latest in a spate of controversies surrounding Vance, which have led some within the GOP to question Trump’s choice of running mate.
In the interview, Vance was asked about the role of race in Trump’s ascendency to the White House. “Race definitely played a role in the 2016 election, I think that race will always play a role in our country, it’s sort of a constant fact of American life,” he said.
“And definitely some people who voted for Trump were racists and they voted for him for racist reasons… [but] I always resist the idea that the real thing driving most Trump voters was racial anxiety or racial animus, partially because I didn’t see it.”
Vance went on to say that Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton was due to his campaigning on jobs and the economy.
“It’s very easy for somebody like me to watch the sources of news that I watch and only see the really offensive stuff that Trump did replayed over and over again,” he said, adding that a Trump rally it was “five percent him being really outrageous and offensive” and 95 percent remarks about bringing down unemployment.
Vance also said that in the run-up to the 2016 election, campaigning was “hyper-racialized” but said the discourse was “not driven by people in the Rust Belt.”
“This was a racialized discourse unlike any we’ve had in a really long time but I don’t blame Trump’s voters for that,” he said.
“It’s telling that the alt-right is driven primarily by very well-educated, relatively smart, relatively stable people – it’s not driven by people in the Rust Belt that go on 4Chan and talk about Michelle Obama in these really nasty ways.”
The Independent has reached out to representatives for Vance for comment on the remarks.
Prior to being selected by Trump to join him on the Republican ticket, Vance was called out for his attacks on the former president himself – reportedly once referring to Trump as “America’s Hitler.”
More recently, before being sworn into the U Senate in 2021, Vance branded Kamala Harris and other Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives” in an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News.
The comments have resurfaced in recent weeks and prompted fierce backlash, with a string of political and public figures, including Hollywood star Jennifer Aniston, blasting his misogyny.
Vance tried to explain away the remarks on SiriusXM’sThe Megyn Kelly Show on Friday, where he insisted his comments were “not about criticizing people who for various reasons didn’t have kids,” before accusing Democrats of being “anti-family”.
“This is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-children,” he claimed.
