Key takeaways from day three of the Republican national convention

1. Republicans are simply not talking about abortion

During his race for the US senate in Ohio, Vance said that he did not support rape and incest exceptions in abortion bans. In 2022, he said he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally”, expressing sympathy for the view that a national abortion ban was necessary to stop women from traveling to different states in order to get abortions.

A section on Vance’s Senate website, accessible as late as Monday, read, simply, “End abortion,” calling him “100% pro-life, a Huffington Post reporter noted. By Wednesday, that message had vanished, as Vance’s old website simply redirected to Trump’s presidential campaign site.

Vance similarly erased his anti-abortion views from his primetime speech to the RNC on Wednesday, and as my colleagues have noted, he’s far from alone. There’s been a conspicuous silence on abortion throughout the Republican convention, as well as on other issues that Republicans appear to see as weaknesses, like Project 2025 and the future of American democracy.

2. Warm reaction to Vance’s bestselling life story, as ‘hillbilly’ aims for White House

The Republican national convention crowd was already eating out of Vance’s hand, as the charismatic 39-year-old Ohio senator talked them through the life story that made him into the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy, a 2016 memoir that became a 2020 feature film starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close.

Vance had described growing up “a working-class boy born far from the halls of power” in Middletown, Ohio, with a single mother who struggled with addiction, and a tough, loving grandmother who kept him from falling prey to a local drug dealer. He described his journey from the Marine Corps, to Yale, to working in venture capital, to being chosen as Trump’s vice-presidential pick.

He neatly contrasted his youth to Biden’s age, noting policies Biden supported when he was in high school, and saying: “Joe Biden has been a politician in Washington for longer than I’ve been alive.” 

Then, talking about other single mothers like his, who had struggled with addiction but never given up, he revealed that his mother, Beverly Aikins, was in the RNC audience with him, and that she is “10 years clean and sober”.

“I love you, mom,” he said, suggesting that she might he able to celebrate her full 10 years of sobriety next year in the White House.

As the cameras panned to Vance’s smiling mother, she mouthed, “That’s my boy! That’s my boy!” And the crowd started chanting, “JD’s mom! JD’s mom!”

3. It’s clear that JD’s job is to woo the rust belt

Vance shouted out to his home state of Ohio in his speech, but he quickly cut off the chants of “O-H-I-O,” quipping, “We gotta win Michigan too.”

His speech was threaded with references to rust belt states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Kentucky, which he connected to the struggles of his Ohio hometown, and to the importance of restoring American factories and American manufacturing.

Vance described a series of economic and foreign policy choices Biden made over his long career that, he argued, hurt American workers, particularly those in towns like he grew up in. Some observers saw the speech as a rewriting of Vance’s own life narrative, shifting from Hillbilly Elegy’s preoccupation with Appalachian poverty’s connection to cultural problems and personal responsibility, to instead blaming politician Joe Biden for creating the conditions that left the people he grew up with, impoverished.

Strikingly, Vance came onstage to the country twang of Merle Haggard’s 2005 protest ballad, America First, which expressed the singer’s opposition to the Iraq war.

4. Republicans highlighted grief and anger over the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021

Some of the family members of the 13 soldiers killed in an Islamic State terrorist attack at Kabul airport during the “disastrous” US withdrawal from Afghanistan spoke at the RNC to criticize Biden.

Alicia Lopez, whose son, Corporal Hunter Lopez, was killed on 26 August 2021, said: “Despite our pleas for answers and accountability, they have pushed us away and tried to silence us. The Biden administration has not owned up to the bad decisions, they have not been transparent about their failures and their so-called leaders work to protect themselves, rather than our sons and daughters who took the oath to defend our country.”

A mother-in-law of a marine killed at Abbey Gate said that Trump, in contrast, had spent dedicated time with family members, offering them what she felt was genuine support in their grief. The family members were also featured in a video in which they said that when they met with Biden as their loved ones’ bodies arrived at a military base in Delaware, the president appeared to check his watch during the ceremony.

Other pro-Trump veterans also spoke to the lasting sense of anger and betrayal they felt in witnessing the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and in the struggles and fears of the Afghans they had worked with who were left behind as the Taliban seized control of the country.

“Throughout our careers, we never had regrets about our service, but this moral injury caused many of us to ask: ‘Why did we serve, if this was the outcome?’” Scott Neil, a retired green beret, said.

A scathing state department review of the military withdrawal from Afghanistan concluded that both the Trump and Biden administrations were to blame as “during both administrations there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow”.

But the RNC’s focus on the withdrawal also took aim at one of Biden’s political strengths. As someone who has lost family members to a car accident and cancer, he has often been praised for his ability to grieve with people, and offer them support in moments of profound loss, even being referred to as “the designated mourner”. But on Wednesday, the RNC offered multiple speakers who portrayed Trump as the man who would comfort Americans in their grief and Biden as a self-involved politician.

5. Chants of “Bring them home” as parents of 7 October hostage speak

Orna and Ronen Neutra, whose son, Omer Neutra, was kidnapped during the 7 October attack in Israel, said Trump had supported them, asked the RNC for continued support in securing their son’s safe return. Omer is one of eight American hostages, Ronen Neutra said.

“President Trump called us personally right after the attack, when Omer was taken captive,” Ronen Neutra said. “We know he stands with the American hostages. We need our beautiful son back and we need your support. We need your support to end this crisis and bring all the hostages back home.”

Shabbos Kestenbaum, a recent Harvard Divinity School student who was part of a group of students who filed a lawsuit alleging that Harvard failed to address antisemitism on campus, also spoke, as did members of a University of North Carolina fraternity who held up an American flag during a pro-Palestine campus protest.