One of the interesting-to-me things going on seems to be that while Trump has been getting a 'pass' for all his terrible ideas and qualities, Vance is *not*.
I'd say it was almost as if Trump went out of his way to find a VP candidate that would cause people in the middle to reevaluate his own performance - but it's not clear that Trump selected Vance for any reason other than pure transactionalism (campaign money from Thiel, Musk, et al) which is IMO pure Trump.