In an additional post, Newsom told Vance to “enjoy your family time” as “the families you’re tearing apart certainly won’t.”
“Had a great time, thanks,” the vice president fired back nonchalantly.
The spat encapsulated an emerging dynamic on the national political stage. More and more, high-profile Democrats —especially those who could run for the presidency in 2028 — see Vance as a particularly fitting foil for their broader attacks against President Trump and his Republican Party.
The 40-year old Ohioan is, for now, the most obvious heir apparent to Trump as the GOP standard-bearer in 2028. He is a leading presence on the party’s big money circuit: on Tuesday, he traveled to Nantucket for a GOP fund-raiser where tickets ran for $100,000 each.
Vance’s prominence, along with his penchant for picking fights with political rivals, makes him an appealing target to Democratic hopefuls looking to command attention and build their own brands. In other words, by attempting to define Vance ahead of 2028, they might be able to further define themselves to voters in the process.
Representative Ro Khanna, another California Democrat with presidential ambitions, has recently tried to pressure to Vance over the metastasizing Jeffrey Epstein controversy surrounding Trump, who had been an acquaintance of the late financier before having a falling out with him. The administration is facing blowback across the political spectrum for not following through on promises to release new information about the convicted sex trafficker’s activities and clients.
Recently, Khanna resurfaced the vice president’s 2021 comments raising the conspiracy theory that Epstein did not kill himself in prison and lamenting that “now we just don’t talk about it.”
“What changed, @JDVance?” asked Khanna on X.
Meanwhile, a number of Democrats mentioned as 2028 contenders pointed to Vance’s tiebreaking vote that advanced Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill” in the Senate earlier this month.
When Vance visited Pennsylvania last week to tout the bill, Governor Josh Shapiro put out a sharp statement urging voters in the state to not forget “he was the deciding vote on the federal budget that will do real damage while ballooning our national deficit.”
Former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York both said Vance was the “deciding vote to cut Medicaid.”
Other Democrats have continued to take shots at Vance’s political brand. During a visit to the early primary state of South Carolina, Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky talked about his electoral success in his state’s extremely conservative eastern region, which features heavily in Vance’s famous family memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”
“That includes Breathitt County in Appalachia, which is the county JD Vance pretends he’s from,” quipped Beshear. (Vance spent time as a child in the Kentucky county, but primarily was raised outside Cincinnati.)
But Vance’s position as No. 2 is an unusual one. Though Trump was just elected, it is his second term, and the 2026 midterms will usher in his lame-duck status, along with the start of the 2028 race in earnest.
The 2028 presidential campaign, of course, might as well be an eternity away in political time. Democrats who are prominent now could fade away, and Vance’s own stock could rise or fall before then. He has not announced any decision publicly on running for president, and Trump has not said whether he would endorse him if he did.
Some of Vance’s allies on Capitol Hill, however, believe Democrats are attacking him already because he is the strongest contender to succeed Trump.
“JD Vance, he is not just the front-runner, he is going to be the nominee,” said Senator Jim Banks, an Indiana Republican. “Democrats know it.”
Vance, said Republican Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, is “a very important voice in our party.”
“So I think they’re all sort of climbing all over themselves trying to gain some sort of attention,” Schmitt, a close ally of the White House, said of Democrats. “Who can be the sort of chief resister? There’s a bunch of tactics. I just think the problem for the Democrats right now is they really don’t have a message that resonates.”
For Vance, the attacks might be welcome, in that they further elevate him as a bogeyman to Democrats in a GOP environment where the most valuable currency is increasingly the hatred of liberals. Conservative media have consistently covered Vance’s spats with Democrats; Fox News praised him for “trolling” Newsom over his posts about Disneyland.
A spokesperson for Vance did not respond to a request for comment.
Some Democrats believe Republicans’ sprawling domestic policy law will prove to be deeply unpopular and that failing to link it to Vance would be a missed opportunity.
“I think it’s important that he doesn’t get a free ride on that,” said Senator Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat, who is vice chair of the party’s official arm for Senate races.
“It’s pretty hard to predict in American politics what’s going to happen next month, let alone what’s going to happen in 2028,” she said, “but he’s a young guy who is going to be around for a long time.”
Some Democrats see value in incorporating Vance into their political messaging whether the 2028 race includes him or not. The party base is hungry for a new generation of leaders to aggressively counter Trump right now, said Andrew Mamo, a Democratic strategist who is advising several Senate candidates in key states.
“JD Vance is a great foil because if you punch him, oftentimes he’ll punch back, and you can get in a boxing match,” Mamo said. “That’s what Democrats who are trying to capture national Democratic attention want to do.”
Indeed, Vance often responds to attacks on social media. He appears to spend considerable time on X in particular, where he has more than 4.4 million followers, sometimes even engaging with low-profile accounts in addition to prominent politicians.
In February, Khanna earned the most aggressive pushback of any of Vance’s would-be Democratic rivals when he criticized the vice president for defending a staffer in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency who had been fired for making racist statements targeting Indian Americans.
Khanna, who is of Indian descent, asked Vance on X if he would tell the staffer to apologize, “for the sake of both of our kids.” (Vance’s wife, Usha, is of Indian descent, and their children are mixed-race.)
In response, Vance fumed that Khanna was engaging in “emotional blackmail over a kid’s social media post,” and added, “you disgust me.”
Speaking to the Globe on Tuesday, fresh off a swing through South Carolina himself, Khanna framed his focus on Vance in broader terms, saying he believed the 2028 GOP nomination would be “wildly contested.”
“He’s trying to make an intellectual argument for Trumpism, and I think regardless of whether he has future ambitions or not, I would still focus on taking on the arguments that he’s making to push back against his conception of America, his conception of conservatism,” said Khanna.
“I think he’s the one person who’s trying to give an intellectual veneer to Trumpism and my temperament is to push for ideas, and so it’s a foil against what he’s doing.”
Tal Kopan of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Sam Brodey can be reached at sam.brodey@globe.com. Follow him @sambrodey.