16 Time July 19/July 26, 2021
super PAC on Vance’s behalf.
Trump is “the leader of this movement,” Vance
tells me, “and if I actually care about these people
and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck
it up and support him.”Republican voteRs still love tRump, but
it’s unclear what that means for other aspiring
pols. Should they be loud and racist and lie a lot?
Should they spout conspiracy theories? Should
they be businessmen and “outsiders”? Should they
adopt Trump’s positions on issues, to the degree
that he had positions on issues?
However you define Trumpism, it had a pow-
erful effect in Ohio. Barack Obama took the state
twice before Trump won it by back-to-back 8-point
margins. The GOP’s conundrum is how to hang on
to Trump’s white working-class supporters as sub-
urban and college- educated white voters jump ship.
“This is our first post-Trump test case,” says Josh
Culling, a Toledo-based GOP consultant. “How
many of Trump’s positions have staying power vs.
the old Chamber of Commerce priorities of lower
taxes, less regulation and smaller government?”
The former President has not endorsed a can-
didate, leaving Vance’s rivals to compete to em-
body Trumpian outrageousness. Josh Mandel, who
aligned himself with Mitt Romney during his un-
successful 2012 run, now gets himself suspended
from Twitter for posting about “Mexican gang-
bangers” and “Muslim terrorists.” Jane Timken, a
Harvard- educated lawyer and longtime GOP donor,
also tries to channel the former President’s furies.
To some Ohio Republicans, the field is not in-
spiring. “There’s a significant void,” says Repub-
lican state senator Jay Hottinger, who has served
in the legislature for more than two decades, of
“serious candidates that are trying to address the
real issues and talk about potential solutions.”
Hottinger would prefer someone like Senator Rob
Portman, the straitlaced fiscal conservative whose
retirement created the vacancy Vance hopes to fill.
Vance thinks the party is looking for a new di-
rection. “Rob’s a good guy and he’s done a lot of
good, but he’s sort of out of alignment with where
a lot of voters are right now,” Vance tells me at
breakfast. “He’s a cautious guy, and the voters are
not in a cautious mood.”vance, 36, believes he has a finger on the pulse of
this new GOP, for whom Fox News host Tucker Carl-
son and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley are role mod-
els. “Voters really want us to do something about the
tech industry,” he tells me by way of example as the
server delivers his plate of bacon. It’s not uncommon,
he says, for people to approach him “and say things
like, ‘I love what you said, but why don’t we break up
these companies and put all the CEOs in jail?’”“i’m noT jusT a flip-flopper, i’m a flip-
flop-flipper on Trump,” J.D. Vance says with a
laugh, slicing into a half-stack of breakfast pan-
cakes. The Hillbilly Elegy author and newly
minted Republican Senate candidate is sitting at
the counter of a Cincinnati diner on July 2, ex-
plaining why he thinks he can win.
The prior evening, Vance had launched his
2022 bid at a steel-tube factory in his hometown
of Middletown, Ohio, with paeans to the American
Dream and blasts of populist rhetoric. “The elites
plunder this country and then blame us for it in the
process,” he told a crowd of several hundred.
Running for office was a predictable next step
for Vance, whose hit 2016 memoir traced his rise
from troubled Appalachian roots to the Marines
and Yale Law School. Hillbilly Elegy was cited by
Hillary Clinton and feted at pointy- headed panel
discussions, though some liberals criticized its up-
by-the-bootstraps framing. At a time when elites
struggled to comprehend Trump’s appeal, Vance’s
diagnosis of rural white Americans’ disillusion-
ment with a government and society that had left
them behind seemed prescient.
These days, Vance’s persona is more right-wing
provocateur than establishment darling. But it’s his
stance toward Trump that seems destined to domi-
nate his campaign in a primary that could be a bell-
wether for the post-Trump GOP. As his rivals strain
to outdo one another with displays of fealty to the
former President, Vance’s past opposition has been
cited as proof of an all-too- convenient conversion.
Vance admits it took him time to come around,
but points to his book and commentary as evi-
dence he understood Trump’s appeal before most.
“I sort of got Trump’s issues from the beginning,”
Vance says. “I just thought that this guy was not
serious and was not going to be able to really make
progress on the issues I cared about.”
But as the longtime Democrats he grew up with,
including his family, embraced Trump, Vance, who
voted for independent candidate Evan McMullin
in 2016, reconsidered. Once he looked beyond the
hysterical media depictions of Trump, he claims,
he saw someone changing the debate around is-
sues like China and immigration. In March, the
two men held an hourlong meeting brokered by
Vance’s friend and former boss Peter Thiel, the
Silicon Valley titan who has seeded a $10 million
VANCE
QUICK
FACTS
Smash hit
Vance’s 2016
memoir spent
74 weeks on
the New York
Times best-
seller list and
was made into
a Netflix film
directed by
Ron Howard.Postscript
Vance’s
mother
Bev, whose
addiction
issues he has
chronicled,
has been
sober for more
than six years
and attended
his campaign
launch.Midwest
venture
In 2019,
Vance
launched a
firm based
in Ohio and
backed by top
tech investors.Former skeptic J.D. Vance
tries to follow Trump’s
playbook in Ohio’s GOP
Senate primary
By Molly Ball/Cincinnati
TheBrief TIME With...