J.D. Vance Has Told Some Whoppers. Does it Stick When He Calls Someone Else a Liar?

Since Vice President Kamala Harris on Aug. 6 tapped Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance has been attacking Walz’s credibility.

Vance has questioned Walz’s honesty about his military service and the artificial insemination method Walz and his wife used.

“Why lie about it?” Vance said to reporters last week when asked about Walz’s statements conflating in-vitro fertilization with intrauterine insemination. 

The former method was not the one used by Walz and his wife, and it is opposed by some in the anti-abortion movement. The latter was used by Tim and Gwen Walz and is favored by abortion foes because it doesn’t result in the destruction of embryos that are fertilized outside the uterus.

Doctors told the Associated Press that patients and their partners often confuse the processes.

But there are two other questions besides whether Walz deliberately or inadvertently misspoke: When he accuses somebody else of being a liar, is Vance a hypocrite? And if he is, does it matter?

On the campaign trail, Vance has certainly told some of what Mark Twain called “stretchers.”

He’s gone from subscribing to human-caused climate change to doubting it, even though the overwhelming majority of scientists who study it say it’s a catastrophic and growing problem.

Vance once compared former President Donald Trump to Hitler. Now he’s running for vice president on Trump’s ticket.

In 2016, he warned Trump against falsely claiming election fraud. Then in 2022 when he was running for the U.S. Senate, Vance himself started lying about election fraud. 

He even tells mistruths about basic details of his background. In fundraising emails, Vance says, “I grew up in the small town of Middletown, Ohio.” 

It’s actually a city of 47,000. The Census Bureau defines small towns as those with fewer than 5,000 people or — about one-tenth the size of Vance’s home city.

And then there’s the fact that Vance is on a ticket with Trump, who is likely the most prolifically mendacious president in U.S. history. 

So when Vance accuses Walz of not telling the truth, he might open himself to charges of living in a glass house and throwing stones. 

So far, Vance’s attacks on Walz’s credibility don’t seem to have gotten much traction. But that’s probably not because Republican voters have decided that Vance is a hypocrite and not worth listening to, one expert said. In these hyper-partisan times, truth is in the ear of the listener, he explained.

“No matter how you slice or dice it, unless they’ve been caught red-handed and that evidence is clear and convincing and compelling, partisans will still believe that their preferred politician didn’t do something wrong,” University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus said in an interview last week. “Politicians can get away with a lot because their partisans will believe them.”

And that applies to politicians who accuse others of lying even when they frequently do so themselves, Rottinghaus said.

“These things are independent of one another. Accusing someone else of being a liar has no effect on other people accusing you of being a liar,” he said. “People live in their own political worlds and will believe what their fellow partisans are telling them.”

Depressingly, that means the more polarized we become, the further we drift from a shared sense of truth.

“You can live in a world where you believe Donald Trump is an honest person,” Rottinghaus said. “You can also live in a world where Donald Trump says other people are liars. And those things can both be true in your mind and that’s because partisanship has cemented those pathways. People are living in their own partisan political fantasy world.”