The darkest Vance lie yet

What Trump/Vance have in store for the least well off Americans

In his interview with Jake Tapper yesterday on CNN, J.D. Vance's closing argument was that there is a seven year gap in life expectancy between people with college degrees in the United States and people without. That gap, Vance argued, encapsulates what this election is all about and why he and Donald Trump are running. The statistic is a real one, by the way. And of significance, the gap is triple what it was thirty years ago, according to this study by the Brookings Institute.

Statements like this are why Vance and his supporters say he represents a new conservative populism whose anti-elitism isn't just performative bashing of college professors and Hollywood. Instead, Vance and his advocates argue, he's sincerely interested in the real problems facing the working class and is committed to changing the paradigm in American politics that has benefited elites at the expense of everyone else. 

It is true that the United States economy remains a top-heavy one, with income inequality much higher than that of our wealthy peers. And our unconscionably low life expectancy for a wealthy country is importantly related to that inequality. In a profound sense, for ordinary people, our nation falls far short of our professed self-understanding as a land of opportunity. In many ways, we're more of a lottery society, with all that implies for haves and have nots. This is true in spite of some meaningful, though precarious gains the country has made under Biden on these measures.

But it’s simply perverse for Vance to assert that these gaps are what he and Donald Trump are running to fix, indeed among the most pathological if more prosaic lies those two have been telling. Because all of the policies they will actually pursue, if given the chance, will make these problems worse. 

Let's start with life expectancy, where the differences among the American states is stark. States that have been under consistent Democratic control have substantially higher life expectancy than those under consistent Republican control. Based on CDC data, the eleven states with the highest life expectancy starting with Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey (each of whose life expectancy is 79 years plus) are and have long been dominated by a Democratic legislative agenda. The first such GOP state to show up on the list is Utah, at number 12.

Conversely, the bottom of the list consists almost entirely of GOP-controlled states, starting with Mississippi, whose average life expectancy, at just under 71 years, is nearly a decade lower than the states at the top, and includes Alabama, West Virginia, Louisiana and Kentucky. Only New Mexico shows up in the bottom fifteen states among those under consistent Democratic control. Of course, these data have complex causes and one always needs to look for confounding variables. One explanation for states with low life expectancy is that most have higher Black populations, and Black folks, for a variety of reasons (some very much related to the policy choices that explain the divide I’m discussing), have shorter life expectancies in the United States. Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana are, in fact, among the states with the highest Black population. But West Virginia, the state with the second lowest life expectancy, has a very small Black population (about 3%), far lower than the top five states, except Hawaii. New York’s is nearly 17%. And among the five states whose Black population is 30% or higher, Maryland is the only one of the five under consistent Democratic control and has an average life expectancy in the top twenty, whereas the four GOP-controlled states all rank 40th or lower, including Mississippi (50th), Alabama (48th) and Louisiana (47th).

This isn’t a fluke, or a coincidence or whatever. Red states like these have made consistent policy choices to reduce the tax burden on the wealthy and to fund those by maintaining weaker social safety nets for the less well off, including the particularly cruel and spiteful decision by ten holdout states to reject Medicaid expansion. These choices have clear and terrible consequences for people’s health and mortality, especially the most vulnerable among us.

All of this mirrors what Trump attempted the first time he was President and that he can be fully expected to try again if he regains the office. Trump tried and nearly succeeded in killing Obamacare the first time around, and Project 2025 has it in the crosshairs for Trump, Part II. Trump can be fully expected to seek tax cuts that, like the 2017 bill he signed into law, overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest Americans, cheered on by billionaires like Elon Musk who are supporting him even more enthusiastically this time around. Vance has tried to fashion himself as champion of the working class, but as I’ve previously noted, his voting record fully belies such pretensions, and Trump’s gleeful endorsement of Musk’s story about firing striking workers gives that particular game away.

Add to all of this what will certainly be, for example, renewed assaults on women’s health initiatives, an end to any possibility of fortifying child tax credits, or other measures that ameliorate some of our inequalities, and the picture is clear. The perverse reality is that, as much as increasingly Democratic college-educated voters despise Trump (and Vance), they will pay far less of a material price in a second Trump administration than will many people whom the GOP ticket professes to champion. Indeed, a Trump/Vance administration will, in practice, pursue an agenda that will certainly do the exact opposite of what Vance claimed to Tapper. It will make worse the very real divide in life expectancy and well-being that already shames our country, along precisely the lines Vance claims to care about.

Vance, of course, knows this. It may not be as outrageous as his preposterous claims about immigrants and pets, or childless cat ladies. But his claim to Tapper may be his most sinister and disturbing lie yet.