Clearly, something had to change. The numbers were in, the people had spoken, and they were not happy with what they’d been consuming. It was time for a hard reset.
And that’s when Domino’s Pizza went back into the kitchen for a do-over.
In 2010, the company splashed out on a massive national campaign responding to criticism from unsatisfied customers. Its pizza crust, Domino’s bravely admitted, tasted “like cardboard” to some focus group members, while the sauce was “like ketchup.” With all the marketing might that its agency CP+B could muster, the pizza chain announced what it called The Pizza Turnaround. It had taken all the complaints to heart and reformulated its recipe.
“There comes a time when you know you’ve got to make a change,” company president Patrick Doyle says in the launch ad. Shortly after announcing the Turnaround, Domino’s stock soared.
During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio seemed to similarly acknowledge that the Republican party needs a Turnaround regarding reproductive rights. (You might say his less-combative-than-usual demeanor suggested a tacit admission of needing a Turnaround for his entire historically unpopular candidacy.) There’s just one glaring difference, however, between the would-be Veep and Domino’s: Vance offered no indication whatsoever that either he or his running mate, former president Donald Trump, plan to change their detested recipe.
“We’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue where they, frankly, just don’t trust us,” the candidate said on the topic of abortion during the debate. “That’s one of the things that Donald Trump and I are endeavoring to do. I want us as a Republican Party to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word.”
He later repeated the line about needing to earn trust back in another answer, further making the case that he has received America’s unhappy feedback.
It’s hard to imagine how he could have missed it.
Abortion is one of the top issues on voters’ minds in this election, according to a recent New York Times/Siena poll, second only to the economy for women. More concerning for Vance, in every election since SCOTUS struck down Roe v. Wade in June 2022, voters have demonstrated the sky-high unpopularity of abortion bans. Last year, even the senator’s home state of Ohio voted to approve a measure that would protect reproductive rights.
At the time, Vance responded by going on the offensive. “There is something sociopathic about a political movement that tells young women (and men) that it is liberating to murder their own children,” he wrote on X in response to the vote. “So let’s keep fighting for our country’s children, and let’s find a way to win.”
But that was way back in the bygone era of . . . less than a year ago. On the debate stage this week, Vance seemed more interested in winning back voters turned off by his stance on abortion than winning the fight “for our country’s children.” Instead of offering any practical solutions, though, he attempted to paint a rosy picture of leaving the abortion question up to individual states, and mounted a half-assed effort at making himself and Trump sound more compassionate.
In response to the first part, Vance’s opponent, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, was quick to point out the flaws in letting states decide. He steered the discussion toward the plight of women like Georgia resident Amber Thurman, who died in 2022 after delays in her medical care due to the state’s current ban on abortions after only six weeks.
“The fact of the matter is, how can we as a nation say that your life and your rights, as basic as the right to control your own body, is determined on geography?” Walz asked his opponent. (Vance agreed that Thurman “should be alive today,” but offered no practical solutions that would prevent other women from suffering the same fate in the future.)
As for making himself and Trump seem more compassionate, well, it’s hard to tout a turnaround on pizza that tastes like cardboard when it still clearly tastes that way.
Although Vance denied supporting a national abortion ban during the debate—downplaying his previous no-abortions-after-15-weeks stance as “a minimum national standard”—he told an Australian podcaster in 2022, “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”
More importantly, though, if Vance indeed understands that the current situation around abortion is why Americans “don’t trust” his party on the issue, why has his running mate outright bragged, time and time again, that he is directly responsible for thrusting America into this situation through his choice of SCOTUS appointees? Why does Trump also paradoxically claim that striking down Roe was a universally popular decision?
“Everybody, Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, and Conservatives, wanted Roe v. Wade TERMINATED, and brought back to the States,” Trump wrote on Truth Social just weeks ago.
Apparently, in the former president’s eyes, America loves cardboard pizza.
Many people watching the debate, however, disagreed.
According to a CBS/YouGov poll, 62% of voters responding claimed that Walz was better than Vance on the topic of abortion. Despite all of his bluster about needing to improve, viewers apparently still find what Vance is offering hard to stomach.