How Will Vance Affect the Race? Look at 2028, Not 2024.

It’s hard to imagine a more eventful few weeks in presidential politics.

The campaign was jolted by President Biden’s debate performance, which led many Democrats to call on him to leave the race. Then a gunman attempted to assassinate Donald J. Trump. And now Mr. Trump has selected a vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, at the start of what promises to be a raucous Republican convention.

Of all these events, the selection of Mr. Vance seems by far the least significant — at least for this campaign. Historically, vice-presidential selections play only a minor role in the course of presidential elections, and Mr. Vance is probably less likely than most to change the direction of the race.

His basic political identity — a white, male, populist Trump loyalist — reinforces the core message of the Trump ticket. This isn’t necessarily good or bad for Mr. Trump, but it makes Mr. Vance less likely to alter the campaign than the typical selection, which often tries to expand the appeal of the ticket or compensate for its weakness. Mr. Vance will not bestow a small home state “bonus” in a swing state, either, as Mr. Vance’s home state, Ohio, is not competitive.

And while Mr. Vance is a well-known and well-spoken figure who is unlikely to slip into obscurity (think Tim Kaine), it’s hard to imagine him outshining the top-of-the-ticket and becoming a dominant story line in the election (think Sarah Palin).

To the extent Mr. Vance’s electoral record is indicative of his political ability — and it’s probably not — it offers little reason to believe he has special appeal to voters. He won the Republican Senate primary in 2022 with just 32 percent of the vote, and probably only by the margin of Mr. Trump’s endorsement.

The 2022 general election didn’t go much more smoothly. He won by only six percentage points, a worse tally than Mr. Trump’s eight-point victory in Ohio in 2020 and the combined 13-point victory for Ohio’s Republican congressional candidates on the same ballot on the same day. In each election, he fared poorly in the highly educated suburbs where one might have assumed that a young Yale-educated lawyer and best-selling author would play well. In the general election, he ran well behind Mr. Trump in Appalachia.

All considered, there’s little reason to expect Mr. Vance’s selection to change the course of this election. Of course, nothing has moved the polls much over the last 10 months, so even an out-of-the-box pick might not have been likely to shake up the race. And even if Mr. Vance did make a big difference, we would probably never know. With the questions about Mr. Biden’s future, the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump and the Republican convention all coming at about the same time as Mr. Vance’s selection, it will be impossible to untangle what exactly is responsible for how the polls shift next.

But while Mr. Vance probably won’t change this race, this pick has probably already changed the course of the next one. With his selection, Mr. Vance instantly becomes a top-tier presidential contender in 2028. And unlike the other obvious potential Republican candidates, Mr. Vance is a committed populist conservative. He is not a reboot of the old Tea Party, like Ron DeSantis or Ted Cruz. He’s not a reconstructed Reagan-Romney Republican, like Nikki Haley or Glenn Youngkin. He’s a self-described nationalist who is well positioned to carry the MAGA torch on trade, foreign policy, entitlements and immigration, even after Mr. Trump is no longer running for president.

There’s no way to know, of course, whether Mr. Vance will prevail in a future Republican presidential primary, but the chance that Trumpism outlasts Mr. Trump just went up. With the new Republican platform reading like a short list of MAGA’s greatest hits, this is perhaps the big early lesson of the Republican convention so far.