Responses to my queries suggest that Vance has provoked a kind of morbid curiosity among political scientists and historians.

“For Vance, simply being Trump’s V.P. has a cost to his popularity,” wrote Diane J. Heith, a professor of government and politics at St. John’s University. “Rhetorical skill and persuasiveness are hard to separate from ideology and issue positions.”

Vance’s rhetoric, Heith continued,

does suggest a mindfulness of the competing pressures of the job. Vance came to the V.P. with his own issue positions, and some significantly differ from the president’s.

When differing perspectives emerge publicly, like with Iran, Vance is placed in the awkward position of massaging his rhetoric to support the president’s while not diluting his own positions too far. It is a difficult tightrope to walk, and that struggle will get harder if he runs in 2028.

John Murphy, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, argued by email that Vance’s problems are of his own making, rather than related to the structural constraints of the vice presidency:

Vance always tries to generalize — he wants to be seen, I think, as a public intellectual, so he’s willing to exaggerate, distort, twist the specific so that it “proves” a larger theory.

His memoir caricatured many in his life to show the obstacles he overcame and to show that those people wouldn’t try hard enough and he did.

He told tales of Haitians to attack immigration in the debate.

In each case, Murphy contended, “it was about a theory — rising out of poverty, great replacement stuff, communism v. capitalism. Even on simple stuff — Vance felt the need to change his name.”

Karrin Vasby Anderson, a professor of communication studies and co-director of the Center for Democracy, Art, and Popular Culture at Colorado State University, wrote:

Vance has an authenticity problem that stems both from the range of small and large things he has shifted on since entering public life, and from the fact that he just seems like a typical politician.

Some of what you are sensing no doubt emanates from his ideological flexibility. There is a sense that he lacks a core set of beliefs and, therefore, lacks stability and groundedness.

There is, according to Anderson, only one constituency firmly in Vance’s corner: “It’s men who spend time in the so-called manosphere, which is where Vance cultivated his political support. He knows how to talk with that demographic on their own terms, so they are more likely to identify with him.”

There is survey data that provides inferential evidence in support of Anderson’s thesis.

Civiqs amassed 53,032 voter comments on Vance’s favorability/unfavorability ratings over the past two years and found that an overwhelming majority of Vance’s support is concentrated among Republicans, 86 percent favorable, 7 percent unfavorable, while independents were 33 percent favorable, 59 percent unfavorable, and Democrats 3 percent favorable, 95 percent unfavorable.