JD Vance on the taxpayer-funded Trump ads: "Not partisan"
Speaking to reporters before a trip to Alaska, the vice president pointed back to the Obama years, and his clip led a busy Monday of short answers on C-SPAN.
C-SPANStory of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 253,176 views a day, 22 times a normal first day on this channel (11,306).
Vance defends taxpayer funded ads: "Not partisan"
"Vance defends taxpayer funded ads: "Not partisan"" is a short C-SPAN clip of the vice president taking questions from reporters on Monday, just before he left for Alaska. The subject was a series of government-paid ads promoting President Trump and his policies. According to the description, one of them closely resembles his 2024 campaign ad. The series is paid for through a $20 million government contract and has drawn criticism from Republicans and Democrats.
Vance said he sees nothing unusual in it. His example was the Obama administration's advertising for the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 health law, which he described as the government using tax dollars to tell people what it is doing. He allowed that some people probably don't like the ads, but said they tell a story about the country rather than argue for a candidate.
Seven hours after it went up, the clip had passed 100,000 views. That is nearly ten times what a C-SPAN short usually collects in its entire first day. The comments came in faster still: more than twenty times a normal first day's worth, in well under a day. Many of them return to the phrase Vance uses to open his answers, and a good number say they expected the Obama comparison before he made it.
It was not the only Monday departure on camera. President Trump, leaving for a campaign event in Nebraska, said Republicans "can vote by mail if they want," a practice he has long criticized. In a separate clip he said threats "linked to Iran" led the U.S. to move its B-1 bombers out of RAF Fairford in England. Both drew crowds well beyond the channel's norm. Vance's few minutes on the ads drew more than either, four weeks before the November 3 midterms.
Published on Trari
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- Channel
- C-SPAN
- Subscribers
- 1,960,000 ▲ 10,000 this week
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 20,855,575
- Channel views, pace per day
- 832,109 (on a normal day: 2,330,629)
- Video published
- October 5, 2026
- Video views so far
- 107,040 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 253,176
The numbers
Three short clips of Monday departures all ran far ahead of a usual C-SPAN first day, and the vice president's led them.
💡 Test your knowledge
Before entering politics, JD Vance became widely known for which 2016 memoir?
Vance's memoir of his family and his Ohio and Kentucky roots, Hillbilly Elegy, was published in 2016 and later adapted into a Netflix film.
