A former undergraduate professor of JD Vance revealed Tuesday that the veep hopeful once asked him to delete a 2012 blog post where he criticized Republicans’ mass-deportation plans and more.
Brad Nelson, who taught Vance at The Ohio State University, told CNN that Vance contacted him in 2016 to ask that he remove the article so he could launch a career in Republican politics.
Nelson obliged with Vance’s request and the post was taken offline, but an archived version of it can still be found in internet archives.
“I was a bit surprised at the blowback he apparently received from the GOP, as I thought his post was fairly innocuous,” Nelson said. “Anyway, I liked JD and wanted to help him out, and so I went ahead and deleted his post.”
The argument Vance made in the article, titled A Blueprint for the GOP, asserted that Republicans ran on unrealistic immigration policies in the 2012 election and that the party had alienated voters of color.
“A significant part of Republican immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting 12 million people (or ‘self-deporting’ them),” Vance wrote. “Think about it: we conservatives (rightly) mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to pass the laugh test. The same can be said for too much of the party’s platform.”
Vance reportedly added that the GOP was relying too heavily on the turnout of white voters while scaring swing-vote minorities away from the party by running candidates like Sarah Palin.
“You can’t actively alienate every growing bloc of the American electorate—Blacks, Latinos, the youth—and you can’t depend solely on the single shrinking bloc of the electorate—Whites,” Vance wrote.
Now, 12 years later, Vance has hinged much of his time as Donald Trump’s running mate on advocating for the same lofty immigration policy—to deport migrants by the millions—he once shot down as implausible. Vance has also been at the forefront of pushing a hoax that Haitian migrants are eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio, which many experts believe will hurt the ticket’s appeal to naturalized Americans of color.
The article adds to a long list of unpleasant nuggets from Vance’s past that have emerged since he entered the national limelight this summer, which includes a pair of photos of the staunch conservative dressed in drag.
Vance has not addressed the old blog post himself, but his team has played it down as a non-story in a statement to CNN.
“There is nothing noteworthy about the fact that, like millions of Americans, Senator Vance’s views on certain issues have changed from when he was in his twenties,” spokesperson Will Martin told CNN.
Vance is no stranger to flipping his views. He was a bitter critic of Trump as recently as 2016, when he publicly referred to the then-presidential hopeful as an “idiot” and “reprehensible.” Behind closed doors, reports said Vance compared Trump to Adolf Hitler.
Vance’s support of the former president, however, has been steadfast since he won a U.S. Senate seat in 2022. He offered a partial explanation behind his infamous flip-flop on Trump on Sunday.
“The reason that I changed my mind on Donald Trump is actually perfectly highlighted by what’s going on in Springfield,” Vance said. “Because the media and the Kamala Harris campaign, they’ve been calling the residents of Springfield racist, they’ve been lying about them. They’ve been saying that they make up these reports of migrants eating geese, and they completely ignore the public health disaster that is unfolding in Springfield at this very minute. You know who hasn’t ignored it? Donald Trump.”
Read More: Vance Had Ex-Professor Delete His Old Blog Post Grilling GOP
