Many who knew the early Vance ponder the question: What happened to him?

I don’t overthink that question; the answer seems obvious enough. I ponder something else.

The anti-populist conservative Vance persona of 2010–17 was well designed to please the individuals and constituencies that held power over his future at that juncture in his career. The angry-white-male persona of 2017–22 was as perfectly aimed at the Thiel-Trump-Tucker nexus as the earlier iteration had been to the Allen-Aspen-Atlantic one.

With a Senate nomination secured, Vance now has new constituencies to please. Ohio today is not the swing state it used to be, yet it’s still home to many non-Trumpy constituencies, including tens of thousands of voters of Ukrainian descent. If elected to the Senate, Vance may rekindle still-higher ambitions, ambitions that cannot be realized by the narrowly based support that got him not quite a third of the vote in last week’s Ohio Republican primary. I very much doubt that the “Vance for President” dream has died—not in him, and not in his backers.

So the question I ponder is not: What happened to the J.D. I knew? It is: Who will J.D. become next?