A former Republican strategist claims Donald Trump supporters have a major problem with JD Vance’s performance in Tuesday’s vice presidential debate: He was too nice.

So says Stuart Stevens, now a senior advisor to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.

“Dive into MAGA’s hardcore social media,” he wrote on X. “Many of them hated Vance’s debate. They wanted Vance to expose Harris as the devil. Instead, he was engaged in a personal rehabilitation campaign aimed at 2028.”

Vance couldn’t really go anywhere else before the debate. After Democrats labeled him “weird” and took out his previous criticism of “childless cat ladies” and claims that immigrants were kidnapping and eating pets, Vance’s favor was in the tank. Polls showed that far more voters disliked him than disliked him.

He seemed to turn that around on Tuesday, when he appeared polite and friendly. He even expressed sympathy for Walz’s son, who once witnessed a shooting and had warm handshakes and conversations with Tim Walz before and after the debate. A CNN flash poll found that Vance’s approval rating among debate viewers improved by 10 percentage points.

“He had a strategy of embracing Walz, rather than attacking Harris, which is probably good for J.D. Vance in the long run,” Stevens told the Daily Beast. “He has a history of reinvention and this was kind of a new phase of that. What did he have to be to get on the card? He had to be ultra MAGA and attack cat ladies.

Now that he’s gotten the ticket, Stevens thinks he’s on a different mission.

“The public opinion is that he’s going to be killed,” Stevens added. “He tried to come across as sort of Romney-Bush territory, an open-minded problem solver.”

The measured performance of the senator was almost the opposite of Trump’s off-the-rails debate last month, which could anger MAGAworld. And it’s true that Vance spent much of the evening focused on himself, which could rub a president who expects absolute loyalty the wrong way.

Still, Vance went after Harris several times. “What did Kamala Harris’ policies actually lead to?” he asked Tuesday evening. “More energy production in China, more production abroad, more business in some of the dirtiest parts of the entire world.”

Some Republican strategists suggested Stevens was spreading a false narrative. One national agent rejected the claim outright. Another veteran Republican strategist Jason Roe also suggested the debate went smoothly.

“Vance has probably done more to help the Trump-Vance ticket than Trump is capable of and that apparently makes Stevens very angry,” Roe told the Daily Beast.