A new report by Vanity Fair claims that Vice President JD Vance sought to contact members of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign to offer his advice on winning the election.
Vance allegedly attempted to contact Jake Sullivan, who was then serving as a senior policy adviser to Clinton.
“JD called me and said, ‘Can you put me in touch with Jake Sullivan?’” an individual who served as an intermediary with Clinton’s campaign told the outlet, according to The Independent.
“I was, like, ‘Jake is running Hillary’s campaign. He’s way too busy,'” the individual added.
“According to the source, Vance made clear that his motivation was defeating Trump, rather than an affinity for Clinton,” PEOPLE stated.
Is JD Vance a craven political opportunist? A true believer in a post-Trump, MAGA agenda? Or is the presumptive 2028 GOP frontrunner waiting for the chance to be his own man? And what does his wife, Usha, think about all of it? The answers may lie in Vance’s pivotal years at Yale… pic.twitter.com/Xj9vv9Krmt
— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) September 16, 2026
PEOPLE shared further:
When the intermediary initially dismissed the request, the source said Vance followed up, arguing that Trump posed a great threat.
“He called me again and he said, ‘I hate Hillary. But I hate Trump more. Trump can’t win. He can’t win. Hillary’s going to lose, but she doesn’t have to,’ ” the source told Vanity Fair.
Vance’s office did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment on Wednesday, Sept. 16.
The account only further illustrates how different Vance’s political position was in 2016 from the one he publicly holds today. At the time, he was openly critical of Trump and expressed deep reservations about his candidacy.
Vance’s political trajectory would change dramatically in the years that followed.
Vance’s public break with his earlier anti-Trump stance began to take shape when he launched his Senate campaign in 2021. Around that time, he deleted a series of tweets he had posted in 2016, including one in which he called Trump “reprehensible” and another describing him as an “idiot,” according to PBS.
Vance ultimately voted for independent candidate Evan McMullin in the 2016 election, according to PEOPLE.
According to The Independent, Vance eventually got a meeting with Sullivan and reportedly discussed Clinton’s strategy for the ‘Blue Wall’ states (Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin).
Vance allegedly warned that Clinton needed to address the rising populist sentiment in the United States.
“He listed Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and what we now call the Blue Wall states. And he’s, like, ‘She needs to come here instead of being down with Beyoncé in Miami. She needs to come here and apologize for the Iraq War. Apologize for sending so many people, my community, all the people in all these states whose sons and fathers died and everybody just forgot about them,’” the individual said, according to The Independent.
A Vance spokesperson denied that he wanted Clinton to win the election.
“We 100 percent reject the characterization that he was trying to help Hillary win,” the spokesperson commented.
Vanity Fair has reported that JD Vance sought to counsel the Hillary Clinton campaign on how to counter Trump ahead of the 2016 election. He requested a meeting with senior Clinton policy adviser Jake Sullivan to inform the campaign that she was on track to lose Wisconsin,… pic.twitter.com/1ppcaKAqKh
— AF Post (@AFpost) September 17, 2026
More from The Independent:
A separate person close to Sullivan confirmed the meeting, and claimed that Vance urged Sullivan to “focus” and drill down on beating Donald Trump.
She’s got to “fix this ‘deplorables’ thing,” the source close to Sullivan said he recalled Vance as saying, referring to Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” comment that was seized on by conservative media and the Trump campaign as an indictment of middle America.
Clinton went on to lose all four of the states Vance reportedly warned the campaign about, dragged down by a perception of belonging to the political establishment while Trump fed the flames of furor and disgust against that same aristocracy.
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