JD Vance sought to help Hillary Clinton beat Trump in 2016 – report

Vance’s office pushes back on report claiming he offered Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign advice in 2016, in the hopes of enabling her to defeat Trump.

By World Israel News Staff

Vice President JD Vance privately sought contact with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016 and offered advice aimed at preventing Donald Trump from reaching the White House, according to a new Vanity Fair report.

The account, published Wednesday as part of a lengthy profile of Vance, adds a previously unreported episode to the vice president’s well-documented opposition to Trump during the 2016 presidential race.

Vance, then best known as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, ultimately voted for independent candidate Evan McMullin rather than either Trump or Clinton.

Vanity Fair cited a person who said they acted as an intermediary between Vance and Clinton’s campaign. According to that person, Vance repeatedly sought an introduction to Jake Sullivan, then a senior Clinton policy adviser who would later serve as President Joe Biden’s national security adviser.

The source recalled Vance making his opposition to both major-party candidates explicit but regarding Trump as the greater concern.

“I hate Hillary. But I hate Trump more. Trump can’t win,” Vance said, according to the intermediary.

The intermediary said Vance urged Clinton’s campaign to devote more attention to the industrial Midwest, specifically naming Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

He reportedly argued that Clinton should travel to the region and address resentment over her 2002 Senate vote authorizing military force against Iraq, particularly among working-class communities whose families had served in the war.

Vance and Sullivan eventually spoke directly about six weeks before Election Day, Vanity Fair reported.

A second source described as close to Sullivan confirmed that a conversation took place, but did not remember Vance making the detailed argument about the so-called Blue Wall states attributed to him by the intermediary.

That source did remember Vance pressing Clinton’s campaign to address the political fallout from her remark that “half” of Trump’s supporters could be placed in a “basket of deplorables.” Vance’s message, the source recalled, was: “She’s got to focus.”

Vance’s office challenged Vanity Fair’s characterization of the contacts, rather than denying that Vance communicated advice to people connected with Clinton.

“A lot of people asked the Vice President for advice in 2016,” spokeswoman Taylor Van Kirk said. She said Vance “never worked for a campaign” and had encouraged politicians in both parties to pay greater attention to working-class communities such as his hometown of Middletown, Ohio.

“We 100 percent reject the characterization that he was trying to help Hillary win,” Van Kirk said.

Vance’s reported advice about the Midwest is notable in hindsight because Trump ultimately carried all four states the intermediary said Vance identified.

Official Federal Election Commission results show Trump defeated Clinton by just 10,704 votes in Michigan, 22,748 in Wisconsin and 44,292 in Pennsylvania. Trump won Ohio by a much wider margin of 446,841 votes. Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania proved central to Trump’s Electoral College victory even as Clinton won the national popular vote.

Clinton’s campaign was subsequently criticized for its strategy in the region, particularly its treatment of Wisconsin. Clinton herself did not campaign in Wisconsin during the general election, although running mate Tim Kaine made appearances there.

Trump won the state by less than one percentage point.

The newly reported outreach is consistent with Vance’s publicly expressed views of Trump at the time, though it goes further than what had previously been known about his involvement in the race.

“I’m a Never Trump guy. I never liked him,” Vance said in an October 2016 interview with Charlie Rose.

Other comments from the period were considerably harsher. Vance described Trump as “noxious” and “reprehensible” in public remarks and, in a private February 2016 message later made public by a former Yale Law School roommate, raised the possibility that Trump could become “America’s Hitler.”

Vance also wrote during the campaign that Trump amounted to “cultural heroin” for struggling white working-class communities — offering an emotionally satisfying response to economic and social decline without, in Vance’s view at the time, addressing its causes.

His relationship with Trump changed substantially in the years that followed.

When Vance launched his Ohio Senate campaign in 2021, he apologized for his earlier criticism and increasingly aligned himself with Trump’s political movement. Trump endorsed Vance in the Republican Senate primary in 2022, Vance won the seat, and Trump chose him as his running mate two years later. The Trump-Vance ticket won the 2024 presidential election, making Vance vice president.

Vance has publicly said his change of position resulted from his assessment of Trump’s first term rather than political convenience.

“I was certainly skeptical of Donald Trump in 2016,” Vance later explained, adding that Trump’s presidency “changed my mind.”