The key to any politician’s mindset is to understand that, first and foremost, they seek to stay in power.

They want to get elected. If they are elected, they want to get re-elected.

This from thegatewaypundit.com.

To stay in power is the central thesis of the political science classic, The Electoral Connection by David Mayhew.

As former President Richard Nixon summed up the concept:

Losers don’t legislate.

For Trump to win in 2024, not only does he need to overcome the overwhelming media bias from the fake-news complex, but he is also battling various Deep State forces organizing against him. And those Deep State forces are willing to lie, cheat, and steal an election to defeat him.

The selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance makes a lot of sense from Trump’s electoral needs, and the deficits of the other options for Vice President become ever clearer.

J.D. Vance will help Trump in key states, with a key constituency, that is also key to winning national elections again for Republicans: disaffected white voters, i.e., discontented, dissatisfied, and resentful of those in power.

Trump published a list of his preferred for Vice President. The list included:

• Florida Senator Marco Rubio, age 53
• North Dakota Governor Doug Burghum, age 69
• Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, age 39
• South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, age 58
• New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, age 40
• Dr. Ben Carson, age 72
• Florida Congressman Byron Donalds, age 45

Trump has publicly said that he wanted to choose someone who could take the reigns of the government and the nation in the case of a crisis. Privately, Trump has said that he did not want someone who was going to seek the limelight and overshadow him.

The experience and lessons learned from traitor Mike Pence seem unclear.

It is obvious now that Pence was busily undermining Trump and the Trump agenda from the start, and Pence was always, quietly, working his own separate agenda from the first Trump administration.

Yet many still expected Pence as Vice President to do the right thing when the moment came to challenge the votes and the voting process used in the stolen 2020 election.

Instead, Pence chose to validate and affirm the deep state.

Pence as a 2024 Presidential candidate had been pathetic and low energy, and he dropped out after 143 days, lasting only from June 7 through October 28, 2023.

The shift in choosing Vice Presidents matches a shift in the Republican Party about how to win national elections.

In 2000, George W. Bush ran as a solid conservative except on a ‘humble foreign policy’ and on school choice.

No Republican won a national election again, except for Bush’s 2004 re-election, until Trump won in 2016.

Trump’s win was despite the conventional wisdom among the consultant class in Washington.

Trump took a signature issue loved by the grassroots but loathed by the beltway establishment, immigration restriction, and made it a winning issue.

In doing so, Trump tapped into the base of the party. The left decried this as racism.

The left wants Republicans to campaign as moderate liberals.

The left tries to reduce every candidate and cause to simply their racial class or economic class.

The left assumes that simply running a black candidate means that blacks will largely vote for that person.

Along this same line of reasoning, the left assumes that running someone with a life story of poverty, will cause poor people to vote for that person.

By a left-wing analysis, the various candidates considered for Vice President:

 – [W]ere geographically useless because none were from a true battleground state that is likely to be competitive in 2024, and

– Several of the candidates were black, which might appeal to black voters, but is not a surefire way to win the black vote due to a variety of factors.

Additionally, research shows Republicans would have to win substantially more of the black vote to shift election results, whereas the GOP needs to shift only a few points of the white vote to win many more elections.

This was team Trump’s great realization and mobilization in 2016 to defeat Crooked Hillary:

[S]peak to issues that matter to rust belt white Americans. This is a population that has real political problems and who are ignored by both parties.

In 2016 Trump won only 54% of the white vote, but the media makes it seem as though the parties are completely racially polarized.

The media completely confuses elected Republicans about who the Republican base really is, and from where it could come.

Various data visualizations over the past decade have further illustrated there are viable paths forward for a Trump-like candidate for Republicans nationwide, but the era of RINO Republicans winning with Bush-family-approved low-energy messages is over.

Additionally, in the electoral college, the biggest source of these disaffected whites are in the rust belt states.

These disaffected whites are hated by progressives, constantly mocked and ridiculed and otherwise abused by left-wing thinkers and left-wing politicians.

To the extent they are tolerated, they are simply ATM’s for low-dollar Democratic causes and a constituency of dying unions who are continually taken for granted by Democrat politicians.

Feeling that the Republican Party is even abandoning at least a position of race-neutrality in favor of endless race favoritism and pandering to minorities risks pushing away whites who are simply tired of radical left-wing racial politics infecting every aspect of their lives.

Trump, a savvy businessman, clearly sees the opportunity:

[T]o take the key to national elections away from Democrats by choosing someone who can uniquely relate to, and connect with, the struggles of Americans in rust belt states like Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Minnesota.

The other candidates offered no serious advantages, and many had serious disadvantages.