Former GOP adviser calls Vance’s Diet Mountain Dew quip ‘cringe’

Former GOP adviser Mark McKinnon said Tuesday that a recent quip by Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the current Republican nominee for vice president, about Diet Mountain Dew at a rally was “cringe.”

“Yeah, really cringe, cringe moment there, and it testifies to what we’re hearing more and more of, which is that Trump campaign’s really having second thoughts about JD Vance,” McKinnon said on “CNN This Morning” with anchor Kasie Hunt.

When talking about voter identification at a rally in Ohio on Monday, Vance said Democrats “say it’s racist to do anything.”

“I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday, and one today, I’m sure they’re gonna call that racist too but — it’s good,” Vance said. 

In his CNN interview, McKinnon said Vance “was the guy that” the Trump campaign “picked when they all assumed that [President] Biden was gonna be the nominee.”

“And they’d thought that they were in a comfortable position, they could double down … pick a guy who would be very popular with the MAGA base,” McKinnon continued. “But he doesn’t — there’s no addition in the JD Vance equation, he doesn’t add any voters, he doesn’t expand the tent at all.”

Vice President Harris is now the likely Democratic nominee after President Biden left the 2024 presidential race Sunday. Democrats see her as a stronger candidate than Biden was due to her perceived ability to better get their message across and her relative youth in comparison to former President Trump.

In an average of national polls by The Hill/Decision Desk HQ, Harris trails Trump by 2.5 points, with the vice president sitting at 45.5 percent support versus the former president’s 48 percent.

The Hill has reached out to the Trump campaign.