J.D. Vance’s Historic Unpopularity Is Already Tanking Debate Chances

Ohio Senator J.D. Vance already has a major setback in his Tuesday matchup against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz: Nobody seems to like him.

Favorability ratings aggregated by CNN political analyst Harry Enten indicate that the country’s opinion of Vance is appallingly low, at -11 percentage points, lower than any other politician currently in the race for the White House.

That makes Vance the least liked vice presidential pick in modern U.S. history at this point in the race—that is, before he’s even had a proper face-off against his opponent. He’s also the second vice presidential pick with a net negative favorability, preceded only by Dan Quale in 1988, who actually had a stronger position than Vance before his first debate with a -3 percent favorability rating.

Walz, meanwhile, is soaring. The “Midwestern Dad” ranked head and shoulders above the favorability ratings of everyone else in the race, including Vice President Kamala Harris, with a +4 percent favorability rating.

Enten’s analysis also suggested that 72 percent of polled Americans believed that Walz has the upper hand in Tuesday night’s debate, making Vance an aggressive underdog with just 28 percent of the country thinking he stands a chance of winning.

Vance’s aggressive rhetoric, baseless conspiracies, and just plain weird comments have rubbed Americans the wrong way in the months since he was selected to be Donald Trump’s right-hand man. The Republican vice presidential pick has ardently defended his position that childless adults should not hold positions of power as they don’t have a “direct stake” in the future of the country, and derided Democratic Party leaders as “childless cat ladies.”

He also invented a lie about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, that has sparked at least 33 bomb threats to the sleepy city, forcing it to evacuate and temporarily shutter several of its schools, colleges, festivals, and a significant portion of its government facilities, including City Hall, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the Ohio License Bureau, the Springfield Academy of Excellence, and Fulton Elementary School.

And Vance’s more general appearances out in public have done everything but humanize him to the country’s voting class. In August, the MAGA Republican’s quick stop for some glazed donuts in a Georgia shop ended up going viral when it became clear that the visit—and his general abrasiveness—was making a couple of people behind the counter painfully uncomfortable.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is really hoping to get his five-count federal corruption indictment thrown out.

Adams’s lawyer Alex Spiro filed a motion Tuesday seeking sanctions against the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, alleging that it had leaked sensitive grand jury materials to the press.

In the filing, Spiro wrote that the government had been facilitating a slow drip of information to the media, so that by the time Adams’s damning federal corruption indictment was unsealed on Friday, “most of the details of the indictment and evidence underpinning the government’s case (weak as it is) had already been widely reported in the national and local press.”

Spiro cited The New York Times, which reported Thursday evening that Adams had been indicted and announced that additional details would be released the next day. Spiro argued that only the prosecution would have been “privy to the government’s plan to announce additional details the next day,” and so it was “therefore clear that the prosecution team is behind the leak.”

Spiro requested an evidentiary hearing to “develop the record as to the scope of the prosecution team’s misconduct and the appropriate remedy, including dismissal of the indictment.”

At a press conference on Monday, Spiro claimed that the prosecution team had committed a “grave breach of the public’s trust” for leaking information.

Adams is accused of unlawfully receiving $10 million in public funds as part of a slew of public corruption charges, including one count of wire fraud, two counts of solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national, and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, federal program bribery, and to receive campaign contributions by foreign nationals.

Adams has also been charged with one count of bribery, which his lawyer is also desperate to see tossed from his case. Spiro argued that the types of gratuities the federal government alleged Adams took don’t actually count as bribes at all.

After a contributor to Project 2025 was outed for his gay porn past, he has finally addressed the controversy.

Last week, online sleuths uncovered 2014 adult film videos of Corey DeAngelis, a right-wing school privatization advocate affiliated with the American Federation for Children and the Cato Institute. And after more than a week of silence, DeAngelis has finally said his mistakes make him an expert in protecting childrens from “transgender ideology.”

“As an activist for parental rights and school choice, my passion is personal,” DeAngelis wrote on X on Monday. “I was a victim of poor decisions and poor influences. I have turned that experience into the fuel that fires me to save young people from being put in the same position I was put in and to help parents protect their children.”

DeAngelis didn’t specifically mention what “poor decisions” he was referring to, but he was allegedly featured in gay adult films under the name “Seth Rose” a decade ago. His past was discovered by a gay porn blog, according to HuffPost, and his apology Monday was praised by fellow conservatives.

He is listed as a contributor to Project 2025 on behalf of the Betsy DeVos–backed American Federation for Children. The federation has since stripped references to him from their website and placed DeAngelis on leave.

The Human Rights Campaign warned that Project 2025 would “take a wrecking ball” to LGBTQ rights. The plan calls for Donald Trump to imprison teachers or librarians who allow students to read LGBTQ materials  and register them as sex offenders. Further, it defines pornography as intertwined with the queer and trans community.

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed.

As Melissa Gire Grant wrote for The New Republic, the intended enemies of Project 2025’s war on pornography are not abusers or the patriarchy but teachers and LGBTQ Americans. And as a school-choice culture warrior, DeAngelis made a living portraying public schools as sites of left-wing indoctrination.

“DeAngelis’ connections to the longtime anti-LGBTQ group Heritage Foundation and his co-authorship of Heritage’s fascist, dangerous blueprint Project 2025, are further proof that he is willing to sell out student safety to anti-LGBTQ extremists,” GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis told The Advocate. “Targeting any student makes every student and school less safe.”

President Biden isn’t happy with Donald Trump’s lies about him ignoring the plight of hurricane victims.

Speaking to reporters Monday night along with North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, who was present via teleconference, Biden sharply responded to a question from one reporter who noted that Trump accused the pair of ignoring the state.

“He’s lying, and the governor told him he was lying,” Biden said. “I don’t know why he does this, and the reason I get so angry about it, I don’t care what he says about me, but I care what he communicates to the people that are in need. He implies that we’re not doing everything possible. We are. We are.”

Another question concerned whether Biden wished he had spent the weekend in Washington instead of Delaware, and if he wished in retrospect that there were more resources available for the hurricane response.

“Come on, stop with the game will you? [Delaware is] 90 miles from here, I was on the phone the whole time,” Biden responded, noting that the question was not of more resources but how to get the resources there amid the devastation.

“It’s hard to get it from point A to point B. It’s hard to get it [there] if some of these roads are wiped out. Communities are wiped out. There’s no ability to land, there’s no ability to get trucks through. There’s no ability to get a whole range of things through,” Biden said. “If I sound frustrated, I am.”

Biden is rightfully angry over the conspiracy theories egged on by Trump about Hurricane Helene that the president and Cooper are neglecting people in Republican areas. These theories have been debunked by Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp, but of course the former president has doubled down.

Meanwhile, it appears that four years in the White House dealing with natural disasters didn’t teach Trump anything about how hurricanes are forecast and how preparations are made. Perhaps Trump should leave relief efforts to the adults who are actually trying to help the victims instead of pushing his self-serving agenda.

The Democratic National Convention is apparently trying to goad Donald Trump, resurrecting old pranks against the Republican presidential nominee just hours before his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, is scheduled to go toe-to-toe against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

On Monday night, the liberal party projected a series of biting taglines onto a panel outside Trump’s New York City residence on Fifth Avenue.

“Trump is a chicken,” the projection read.

The projection reportedly appeared just hours after Vance arrived at Trump Tower for the debate, which will take place Tuesday night, without an audience, at CBS Broadcast Center in Manhattan.

Some of the other jabs flashed through the projection included references to Vance’s old tweets, including one in which he referred to Trump as an “idiot,” and stabs at Trump’s ongoing affinity for Project 2025, a 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto intended to help him to install far-right policies in the executive branch as seamlessly as possible should he win in November.

“Vance on Trump: ‘What an idiot’,” the signage said.

Democrats did something similar in August, branding Trump Tower in Chicago with giant messages during the Democratic National Convention. Those phrases included: “Trump-Vance: Out for Themselves,” as well as “Trump-Vance: ‘Weird as Hell,’” “Harris-Walz: Fighting for You,” and “Project 2025 HQ.”

But Monday night’s prank has a more direct objective than simply trolling the Republican ticket. Instead, it’s transparent bait for Trump, who has flat-out rejected the idea of debating Vice President Kamala Harris again after his first performance against her turned unbelievably sour, frustrating his team, allies, and donors.

“As Vance takes the debate stage to attempt to make up for Trump’s own lackluster debate performance, these projections on Trump Tower NYC are a reminder that Trump and Vance are out for themselves while Trump remains afraid to go back on that debate stage and be held accountable by Vice President Harris for his failed record and his dangerous agenda,” DNC spokesperson Abhi Rahman said in a statement.

Donald Trump is already explaining away J.D. Vance’s performance during the vice presidential debate, and it hasn’t even happened yet. 

During an interview on Fox Business Monday, Kellyanne Conway asked Trump whether he would consider doing another debate. 

The former president tried to downplay his outright refusal to go head-to-head with Kamala Harris again, and implied that Vance would face the same treatment Tuesday night. 

“I would love to have two or three more debates, I like it, I enjoy it. But they’re so rigged and so stacked,” Trump said. “You’ll see it tomorrow with J.D., it’ll be stacked.”

Trump has used a similar playbook to undermine the outcomes of his own debates, both before and after they happened. Before the first presidential debate in June, the Republican nominee attacked CNN’s hosts, and then walked back his claims after they didn’t fact-check him on air. 

Before his debate with Harris, he claimed that ABC News would be biased against him. He and his MAGA acolytes continued to insist this was the case after the debate moderators fact-checked him on air for his outlandish lies about babies being aborted after they’re already born and Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.

Now Trump is claiming the debate will be rigged as a safety net for Vance, who has his own problems with the truth to contend with. CBS News, which is hosting the debate, said that it will be up to the candidates to fact-check each other. 

Conway went on to say that when asked about doing a second debate, Trump “said no, but he didn’t totally say no,” according to The Hill. Crucially, in Trump speak, that was a definite no.

Harris previously accepted CNN’s invitation to  appear in another presidential debate on October 23, but Trump claimed last week that it was “too late” for another debate because early voting had already begun in some states. Before that, Trump had a different excuse, declaring that he wouldn’t seek a rematch because only someone “beaten” would ask for one. Instead, the former president has run scared from a second matchup. 

The vice presidential debate will take place at 9 p.m. at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York.

On Saturday, a 43-foot-tall nude statue of Donald Trump was installed near Interstate 15 just outside of Las Vegas, immediately drawing a backlash from the former president’s supporters.

The foam-and-rebar art installation, weighing about 6,000 pounds, is titled Crooked and Obscene and is expected to travel to other cities, although dates and cities for the tour have not been announced, according to The Wrap.

The artists behind the “anatomically correct” statue, who want to stay anonymous, said in a statement that the former president’s nudity was “intentional, serving as a bold statement on transparency, vulnerability, and the public personas of political figures.” But Republicans, as one might expect, are livid.

“While families drive through Las Vegas, they are forced to view this offensive marionette, designed intentionally for shock value rather than meaningful dialogue,” the Nevada Republican Party said in a statement, according to The Telegraph.

Right-wing influencer Ian Miles Cheong posted on X that Trump, if elected president, “should jail everyone who was a part of this effigy’s creation.”

Fellow right-wing conspiracy theorist Catturd (real name Phillip Buchanan) called the people behind the statue “demons,” piggybacking on yet another right-wing influencer’s post calling the art piece “POLITICAL VIOLENCE.”

While these right-wing figures are freaking out, this isn’t even the first instance where a nude Trump statue has been erected. In 2016, just before the election, five small naked Trump statues went up on street corners in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Seattle, and New York City, only to be taken down by local authorities because the artist didn’t secure a permit.

The artists behind this latest art project are pretty tight-lipped, so there’s no word on whether they secured a permit themselves. On a related note, Trump on Sunday told supporters in Wisconsin that if he wasn’t campaigning, “I could’ve been sunbathing on the beach. You have never seen a body so beautiful. Much better than Sleepy Joe.” He probably won’t like this statue, though, and definitely won’t add it to his NFT trading card collection.

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is begging the federal government to urgently “send the funds” to help the American Southeast recover in the wake of Hurricane Helene, even though she herself stood in the way of emergency relief funds just last week.

“The storm was supposed to come directly across my district, but when it came through Georgia, it went to the east, and we mainly just got a lot of rain,” Greene told Real America’s Voice’s Terrance Bates. “When we go back to Washington, we will be working hard to make sure that states like Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, North Carolina get the funding that they need.”

Greene was one of 82 Republicans who voted last week against a continuing resolution to keep the government funded. If she had been successful, the government would have been in shutdown mode from Tuesday onward, preventing any region from receiving the critical assistance.

“We’ve already signed a letter,” Greene told Bates. “We sent that letter to Joe Biden requesting relief that Brian Kemp, our governor, has already requested. So our entire delegation in Georgia has signed onto that letter.”

“We need them to step in and send the funds and the relief that these people deserve,” she added.

But Greene’s public demands ring a little hollow. During the storm, she was spotted gleefully attending a football game alongside Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, while Kemp revealed earlier Monday that President Joe Biden had called him over the weekend to assess the state’s needs.

Greene also took the opportunity to take a stab at the Biden administration, even while lobbying for federal aid from the executive branch.

“President Trump is a man of action,” she told the right-wing network. “We don’t need a sleepy Joe in the White House. We don’t need Kamala Harris, who they’re propping up.”

Donald Trump flailed Monday when asked to produce any evidence to support his claim that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were purposefully withholding aid from people affected by Hurricane Helene.

Trump suggested in a Truth Social post earlier Monday that he’d received “reports” from North Carolina claiming that the Biden administration and Democratic Governor Roy Cooper were “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas” in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The western region of North Carolina is currently experiencing severe flooding.

MSNBC reporter Garrett Haake attempted to press Trump during a stop in Valdosta, Georgia, asking him what, if any, evidence he had to back up his outlandish claim.

“Take a look,” Trump responded, walking away.

Haake translated the flippant response to mean, “essentially, I’ve got nothing to show you right now, why don’t you go find it yourself.”

So in short, Trump has absolutely no evidence, and these so-called “reports” seem even less legitimate than the debunked ones claiming that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors’ pets.

In a second post about hurricane relief, Trump claimed that Biden and Harris had “left Americans to drown in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South.”

Trump also claimed that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, with whom he has his own uneasy alliance, had a “hard time” reaching Biden to discuss disaster relief, and that the president had been “very non-responsive.” That was also a lie.

Kemp said that he’d already spoken to Biden. “The president just called me yesterday afternoon. I missed him, and called him right back,” Kemp said Monday. “And he just said, ‘What do you need?’”

It’s taken the Republican nominee no time at all to pull focus away from disaster relief, trying instead to enrage voters in two key battleground states responding to a deadly natural disaster.

A Georgia judge on Monday struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban.

Fulton County Superior Judge Robert McBurney quoted “liberty” in a ruling that rejected the controversial ban outlawing abortion after six weeks, before many people know they are pregnant. Abortions in the state will now be allowed until 22 weeks, as they were before the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, when Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed into law the six-week ban.

McBurney had some choice words for politicians in his ruling, writing, “It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.”

He added, “our higher courts’ interpretations of ‘liberty’ demonstrates that liberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.”

The state law prohibited abortions after six weeks, based on the misleading notion that a “heartbeat” could be detected in an embryo around that time. In reality, an embryo does not have a heart at six weeks, let alone cardiac activity. A fetus is also not viable outside the body till much later in a pregnancy.

McBurney got the chance to rule on the law after it was sent back to Fulton County court by the state Supreme Court last year.

Georgia’s restrictive abortion ban killed at least two women since its passage and caused Georgia’s monthly abortion totals to drop by roughly half.

This story has been updated.