Once again, Ohio is trying to pawn off one of its worst politicians on the country. It’s long been a strategy of the Buckeye State to get rid of our crumb-bums by getting them elected to national office. Consider William Henry Harrison, who did the country a favor by catching pneumonia on his way to inauguration; James A. Garfield, whose assassin was smart enough to shoot at point-blank range; William Howard Taft, who aided the nation’s poets by rhyming with graft; and Warren G. Harding, whose cronies from his Ohio hometown were so corrupt that they sold off the country’s first petroleum reserve privately for kickbacks.
Well, we Ohioans know a thing or two about running against Vance. Just don’t ask Tim Ryan, who lost to Vance in 2022 by a sizable margin, apparently without learning about his own many strategic mistakes. So the first thing that national Democrats must learn is to forget all of those ridiculous on-air advertisements by MSNBC hosts claiming that Tim Ryan was running a spectacular campaign. No, Tim Ryan ran a terrible horrible imbecilic campaign, which is why he lost by 8 points in an election that Ryan should have won. Ryan did, however, provide a guidebook on all of the things not to do when running against JD Vance. Here’s a synopsis of that guidebook.
First, you may feel an urge to label Vance as a white Christian nationalist. Forget it because the label is wrong. Vance may propound an odd mix of right-wing libertarian ideologies, but he is not a racist, nor a Christian nationalist, as much as you might want him to be. During one of their two debates, Tim Ryan tried to peg Vance as a supporter of white supremacists, which Vance was able to parry by pointing out that he is married to Usha Chilukuri Vance, a moderately dark-skinned East-Indian Hindu. It was a humiliating moment for Tim Ryan. If her husband is elected, Usha would be the first Hindu spouse at the top of American government. (Kamala Harris, though part East-Indian, considers herself a Baptist.) Forget about attacking Vance on diversity grounds.
Second, do not bring up Vance’s old history of criticizing Trump. Tim Ryan did this relentlessly and I’ve already seen dozens of Facebook posts now attempting to do the same. This attack only gives Vance opportunity to explain, as he has done hundreds of times, why he has changed his opinion. It also makes Vance look like an independent thinker, which most voters would like to see in a vice president. The days of wanting sycophants in the #2 spot are definitely over, and Kamala Harris would do well to voice the ways in which she disagrees with Joe Biden. Pointing out the old differences between Trump and Vance makes the GOP ticket look non-monolithic.
The enormous mistake that Tim Ryan made was to try to emulate Vance. Vance has obviously taken ownership of the populist label, that coveted but vacuous banner of the American Midwest. Vance’s claim to be a populist was so successful, based on an encouraged misreading of his book, Hillbilly Ellegy, that Tim Ryan ceded that ground to Vance and tried to copy it, something that Ryan was not equipped to do. Ryan is a Catholic lawyer who started in politics as an aide to the corrupt James Trafficant, a man who actually ran for office from jail, allowing Tim Ryan to sneak into Trafficant’s congressional seat. Farmland blood and soil this is not. So Ryan tried to copy Vance, but without a book, and the sad act descended to swigging beer from a can in an RV on live TV.
Most fatally, Tim Ryan decided that the pretend-populist act meant distancing himself from all of the “liberal” Democrats in Ohio. In the same election, the mayor of Dayton, Nan Whaley, ran for governor, with Cheryl Stephens, a black woman from Cleveland, as running mate. Ryan refused to appear with them or share resources with them, which drove the entire 2022 Ohio Democratic ticket into the abyss. That is the Democratic calamity that made JD Vance a phenomenon. Trump ought to pay Tim Ryan a finder’s fee.
This never should have happened. I had the strong sense throughout that campaign that none of the Democratic leaders, including Tim Ryan, had bothered to read Hillbilly Elegy, so they didn’t realize how much the book exposes JD Vance as a fraud. Vance is not a populist, and the book is the opposite of an elegy to the poor and the working class. Vance did have a genuine upbringing in flat Middletown, Ohio, which is not close to Appalachia, and therefore is not “hillbilly,” but the book is a repudiation of that upbringing. Even the title is intentionally derogatory. Real Appalachians do not call themselves “hillbillies” – it’s a term of opprobrium, used for the denigration of others. (I live in actual Appalachian Ohio.) The title is pure sarcasm, a play on the phrase Hillbilly Eulogy – he thinks the “hillbilly” life is a path to death.
Vance’s book was not written as a defense of Appalachian life or mentality. Rather it is a condemnation, written from the perspective of a child of Midwestern poverty who has gained, through academic social science, imagined knowledge of how self-destructive the working-class mentality is. One quotation should suffice:
“We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance—the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.”
This is not populism, it’s an elitist put-down. But in the 2022 campaign, Vance was never called out on being an anti-populist, a man who sees the poor and the working class as fundamentally bad and corrupt. His recommended escape is the way he himself escaped: go to Yale and become a hedge fund manager, marry a Hindu, and kiss the ass of Donald Trump. This is not what Andrew Jackson or William Jennings Bryan had in mind.
Vance’s book is not even about Appalachia, a place where genuine culture does remain, which acts as a bulwark against Vance-style nihilsm. Middletown is a different kind of place, arguably adrift in a cultural wasteland between Appalachia and the Midwest, really a suburb of Cincinnati, where Vance now claims to have a home. Both Vance and Sherrod Brown are predominantly of Scots-Irish ancestry, but that doesn’t make either of them Appalachian. In the book, Vance claimed that his spiritual “home” was where his great-grandparents lived in Jackson, Kentucky, which is in Appalachia, but it’s unclear how much time Vance spent there, and the claim undercuts his political assertion to have grown up in Ohio.
By the way, the Vance VP nomination is very bad news for Sherrod Brown, because Republican turnout in Ohio, which might have been low, can now be expected to skyrocket.
Vance’s foreign policy is frankly un-American. He leads members of Congress in openly supporting Putin’s Russia, and his election would be a death knell for Ukraine. This issue should lead the campaign against Trump and Vance, not be buried under a pile of inscrutable domestic issues. Vance’s love of Russian totalitarianism should be tied to his disdain for the American working poor.
This is the way to run against JD Vance. Read the man’s book instead of seeing the gauze-encrusted Ron Howard movie version. Call him out on his anti-populism instead of trying to emulate his fakery. If Trump wins, as is likely, Ohio will have yet another Senate seat open up. Democrats should bar Tim Ryan from running for it. Until November, the slogan should be: JD Vance hates America.
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Geoffrey Sea is a historian and writer who lives in Appalachian Ohio. He was a 2020 National Democratic Convention delegate for Joe Biden.
