By Andrew Kaczynski | CNN
A week after President Barack Obama won reelection in November 2012, JD Vance, then a law student at Yale, wrote a scathing rebuke of the Republican Party’s stance on migrants and minorities, criticizing it for being “openly hostile to non-whites” and for alienating “Blacks, Latinos, [and] the youth.”
Four years later, as Vance considered a career in GOP politics, he asked a former college professor to delete the article. That professor, Brad Nelson, taught Vance at Ohio State University while Vance was an undergraduate student. After Vance graduated, Nelson asked him to contribute to a blog he ran for the non-partisan Center for World Conflict and Peace.
Nelson told CNN that during the 2016 Republican primary he agreed to delete the article at Vance’s request, so that Vance might have an easier time getting a job in Republican politics. However, the article, titled “A Blueprint for the GOP,” remains viewable on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
“A significant part of Republican immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting 12 million people (or ‘self-deporting’ them),” Vance wrote. “Think about it: we conservatives (rightly) mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to pass the laugh test. The same can be said for too much of the party’s platform.”
Twelve years later, as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Vance espouses many of the same anti-immigrant postures that he criticized back in 2012 as a 28-year-old law school student. In recent days, Vance has amplified baseless claims against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
But asked on Sunday about his previous criticism of Trump’s immigration posture, Vance argued Trump’s immigration rhetoric was actually the reason he changed from a Trump critic to supporter.
“The reason that I changed my mind on Donald Trump is actually perfectly highlighted by what’s going on in Springfield,” Vance said. “Because the media and the Kamala Harris campaign, they’ve been calling the residents of Springfield racist, they’ve been lying about them. They’ve been saying that they make up these reports of migrants eating geese, and they completely ignore the public health disaster that is unfolding in Springfield at this very minute. You know who hasn’t ignored it? Donald Trump.”
Will Martin, a spokesman for Vance, told CNN that Vance has long supported strong border security measures, including deportations, and now holds one of the most conservative voting records in the Senate. He said his views on deportations had changed since the time of the blog post.
“There is nothing noteworthy about the fact that, like millions of Americans, Senator Vance’s views on certain issues have changed from when he was in his twenties,” Martin told CNN in an email.
Vance’s past anti-Trump rhetoric is well-known, as he was a vocal critic of the former president during much of Trump’s first year in office. And though Vance defended many of his supporters, he wrote on Facebook in 2016, “There are, undoubtedly, vile racists at the core of Trump’s movement.”
Nelson, who spoke highly of Vance in messages with CNN, calling him one of the brightest students he’s taught, said Vance’s post had “ruffled some feathers in some campaigns” that Vance was thinking of working for.
“I was a bit surprised at the blowback he apparently received from the GOP, as I thought his post was fairly innocuous,” Nelson told CNN. “Anyway, I liked JD and wanted to help him out, and so I went ahead and deleted his post.”
“He didn’t suggest that his thinking on the topics he wrote about in his post had changed,” Nelson added in messages to CNN.
CNN found the article through X, where it was mentioned by the think tank in 2012.
Two other blog posts Vance wrote for the website are still active, but CNN noticed the “Blueprint” article had been removed from the website. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, where the post was saved, shows it was deleted sometime between March 2014 and February 2016.
‘Appealing only to White people’
Vance began his article by launching into a blistering critique of the GOP’s strategies and candidates, which he blamed for the party’s failures in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.
“When the 2008 election was called for Obama, I remember thinking: maybe this will teach my party some very important lessons,” Vance wrote. “You can’t nominate people, like Sarah Palin, who scare away swing voters. You can’t actively alienate every growing bloc of the American electorate—Blacks, Latinos, the youth—and you can’t depend solely on the single shrinking bloc of the electorate—Whites. And yet, four years later, I am again forced to reflect on a party that nominated the worst kind of people, like Richard Mourdock, and tried to win an election by appealing only to White people.”
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Mourdock’s Senate campaign imploded that year after he said that pregnancies resulting from rape were “something God intended.” During his own Senate run in 2022, Vance made his own controversial comments about rape and pregnancy, which have resurfaced after he secured the Republican nomination for vice president.
In the article he asked Nelson to delete, Vance argued the Republican Party would have problems if it did not adjust for the country’s changing demographics. He criticized the GOP’s adherence to supply-side economics, comparing it to supporting outdated policies like Soviet containment. He said during the Bush years this economic approach led to wage stagnation and concentrated growth, which alienated minority voters who found Democratic policies more relevant and appealing.
“Republicans lose minority voters for simple and obvious reasons: their policy proposals are tired, unoriginal, or openly hostile to non-whites,” Vance wrote.
