If JD Vance was in an intro to economics class, he’d get a big fat “F” on defining “socialism.”

At a press conference announcing a crackdown on major companies that hire foreign workers, the vice president was asked to define socialism in light of the growing number of socialist candidates running for office across the country.

“Oh, man,” Vance said with a sigh. “You know, I guess, it’s honestly, it’s a hard term to define these days, because very often, socialism, you know, classically, you would think socialism is about prioritizing workers.”

He continued:

And yet, in reality, I guarantee that most of the self-described socialists running across the United States of America are going to howl about this announcement today, which is prioritizing American workers over foreign workers. So, I don’t know what the term means anymore. I think, in reality, what it actually means in the American context is that you want to replace American workers with foreign workers, and you want boys to play in girls’ sports. That’s what unites the socialists that I see running across the United States of America today.

The actual definition of socialism is pretty straightforward: According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, socialism is “an economic and social doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources.”

The definition adds that, in the socialist view, “individuals do not live or work in isolation but live in cooperation with one another,” and that “everyone who contributes to the production of a good is entitled to a share in it.”

Q: How do you define socialism personally?JD VANCE: I think in reality what it actually means in the American context is you want to replace American workers with foreigners workers, and you want boys to play in girls' sports pic.twitter.com/2tMA487lRp

It might benefit Vance and other politicians to learn the true meaning of socialism, which more Americans than ever view positively. According to a Gallup poll released Wednesday, about 43% of Americans say they view it positively — the most since Gallup began measuring views on the topic in 2010.

This is thanks largely to changing views of Democrats, 66% of whom viewed socialism positively last year, up from 50% in 2010. But Gallup notes the uptick over the last year comes entirely from political independents, 45% of whom expressed a positive view of socialism in 2026, up from 37% just a year earlier.

Capitalizing on the popularity of Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s democratic socialist mayor, multiple democratic socialist candidates are now running in the midterm elections. As Americans increasingly start to come around to socialism, experts say it’s not surprising that Vance and other conservatives are eager to change the subject.

Bill Yousman, a professor in the communication and media department at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, thinks Vance was being purposely obtuse on Thursday.

“The response is completely nonsensical and unserious,” Yousman told HuffPost. “They can’t engage with what socialism really means because the ideas of socialism are both increasingly popular and threatening to the type of hypercapitalism that Trump and his allies want to impose on the world.”

HuffPost reached out to the White House for comment, but did not receive an immediate response.

Conscious of how well trolling plays on social media, Trump and Vance are also now taking a “‘shitposting’ approach to politics” offline, Yousman said. “It’s not grounded in any reality, but is purely based on trying to ‘own the libs’ ... They treat politics like insult comedy. But, increasingly, the public is not laughing.”

Yousman also thinks both Trump and Vance subscribe to the “Breitbart Doctrine,” the idea that “politics is downstream from culture“ and that to change politics, you must first change culture. The doctrine is the brainchild of the late Andrew Breitbart, the conservative blogger, founder of Breitbart News and co-founder of HuffPost alongside Arianna Huffington.

Trump adviser Stephen Bannon has adopted it, too, because in many ways, it’s a winning strategy, Yousman said.

“They have no real response to the populist promise of true socialism, so instead, they relentlessly focus on ramping up race and gender grievances,” he said.

The ideas of socialism are both increasingly popular and threatening to the type of hypercapitalism that Trump and his allies want to impose on the world.

Ultimately, this is a small test by Vance to see what resonates, said Erik Bleich, professor of political science at Middlebury College in Vermont and the author of the upcoming “The Global Culture War: How the World Got ‘Woke.’”

“If it draws attention, Republicans may put more effort into tying socialism to the culture wars,” he said.

By tying socialism to issues Vance knows many voters are skeptical of — offshoring and culture war issues like transgender athletes in sports — he may prompt some people to think twice about, or even recoil from, the label.

But such trial balloons don’t always catch on across the conservative movement, and his comments are unlikely to sway left-leaning voters or independents already sympathetic to socialism, Bleich said.

“If anything, some may embrace the label more strongly as a way of signaling their opposition to Vance and Republicans,” he said.

More broadly, socialism and communism have long been wielded as political scare words to discredit progressive policies, cast government spending as radical and paint political opponents as dangerous or un-American.

“It has worked for Republicans in the past, so they are just pulling out an old playbook,” said Don Haider-Markel, a professor of political science at the University of Kansas.

Trump, too, is eager to portray Democrats as radical leftists as Democratic socialists gain ground. “America will never be a communist country. Won’t happen,” Trump said in his Fourth of July speech on the National Mall.

“It’s like a cancer. You’ve got to cut it out,” he continued. “Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America. We’re not going to let it happen.”

Vance’s pivot to cultural issues rather than actually engaging with weightier issues is nothing new, either. The Trump-Vance ticket’s closing message in the 2024 election relied heavily on anti-transgender rhetoric and advertisements; analysis done by the conservative think tank American Principles Project found that the Trump campaign spent $37 million on anti-trans ads, while Senate GOP campaigns and their supporting groups spent an additional $77 million on such ads in ten states.

With the midterms approaching, Vance seems keen to pivot back to cultural war issues ― a subject he appears far more eager to discuss than socialism.

“The vice president is trying to reinforce the culture war themes that many Republicans are using in their campaign ads right now,” Haider-Markel said.

In any case, Haider-Markel thinks Vance could be more artful in his attempts to pivot, especially if he plans to run for president.

“The VP is not doing a good job setting himself up for 2028,” he said.

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