[L]ook at who Republican voters increasingly are. They are people who disproportionately serve in the military, but Republican foreign policy has been a disaster for a lot of veterans. They are disproportionately folks who want to have more children. They are people who want to have more single earner families. They are people who don’t necessarily want to go to college but they want to work in an economy where if you play by the rules, you can you actually support a family on one income.
Have Republicans done anything for those people really in the last 15 or 20 years? I think can you point to some policies of the Trump administration. Certainly, instinctively, I think the President gets who his voters are and what he has to do to service those folks. But at the end of the day, the broad elite of the party, the folks who really call the shots, the think tank intellectuals, the people who write the policy, I just don’t think they realize who their own voters are.
Now, the slightly more worrying implication is that maybe some of them do realize who their voters are, they just don’t actually like those voters much.
J.D. Vance, interviewed by Tucker Carlson (H/T Rod Dreher)