The Vance Gamble

All In on Weird

The Vice Presidential position next to Donald Trump was recently picked up by one J.D. Vance. It was both expected and surprising to observers. Vance did not have many appeals to the wider electorate, he was two years into his first senate term, and that was a seat which was won by a much closer margin than it should have been. In any other election, Vance would have been discarded early on. Of all the picks, even on the GOP’s far right, Vance was the most uncertain at best, and the least popular at worst.

But Vance had a key ally: money. On June 6th, exactly 80 years after American boots hit the beaches of Normandy, Vance and his allied forces began the campaign for his spot as VP. It was on this day that Donald Trump was given the support of a significant portion of Silicon Valley* at a fundraising event which raked in $12 million for Trump. This was also around the time that Trump began to embrace crypto currency donations. Both were sources of money that a cash strapped Trump was more than happy to tap into.

*I’m going to be using “Silicon Valley” to refer to both tech oriented venture capitalists and crypto executives, as they are the two groups Trump has received the most support from in the tech industry

A savvy campaign strategist would probably have realized something about this situation: Silicon Valley executives and retail crypto investors were the largest new sources of donations compared to 2020 and 2016. If the election was going to be an easy layup against Joe Biden, it didn’t make sense to turn people away. An assumed victory gave much less leverage to the more strategically conservative advisors and emboldened these new hi-tech stakeholders in the Republican Party. It was these new power players who pushed Vance to the top of the list.

These moves would not have been possible without my old friend: David Sacks. And just to be clear, I wanted to stop talking about David Sacks, I really did. I ended that three part series with a nice note about how I think he should get back into movies. That would have been a really nice project for him. But he kept coming back, again and again, David Sacks returned to politics.

Never let a public meltdown hold you back from your dreams

J. D. Vance is closely linked with Sacks because not only do both run in the same business circles with Peter Thiel, but because Vance likely would not be in the senate without the help of David Sacks. Vance was floated about $1 million by Sacks in 2022, along with $15 million by Thiel. I don’t think it was Sacks’ million that influenced the race decisively, but looking at the margins of his win, Vance may have avoided a drawn out and embarrassing recount that could have branded him a near-loser.

David Sack’s doesn’t even like Trump. After the 2022 midterms, he said that “Trump has been having this extended hissy fit and living in denial since the loss in 2020”. In that episode, Sacks even identifies what is now being called the ‘weird’ issue that Republicans have. This is strange considering who J.D. Vance is, but at least there’s some awareness.

“I know that (…) 40 percent of the country passionately loves Trump but here's the problem, he's capped at 40 percent. Independents and moderate centrists will not give the guy another look and so you cannot win a major national election in this country with 40 percent of the vote no matter how passionate that 40 percent is” - David Sacks.