Elections, Senate

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      What to Watch in Ohio and Indiana Primary Elections Tuesday

      by

      Ohio’s primary elections almost weren’t going to happen Tuesday. A heated and confusing legal battle over the redrawing of congressional districts kept voters waiting for a final map. And in last-hour negotiations, elections officials took all of the statehouse races off the May 3 primary ballot, leaving them to be decided at a later date.But all eyes remain on the state, with one marquee matchup at the top of the list: the crowded, heated and expensive Republican Senate primary.More so than many other contests across the nation, the Ohio Senate race to replace Rob Portman, an establishment Republican who is retiring, will test former President Donald J. Trump’s influence on his party, and whether Republican voters have an appetite for hard-right, anti-establishment figures in his mold — or only for those with his seal of approval. The results could also give Democrats a better idea of their chances to secure the open seat in November.Once considered a national bellwether in the industrial heart of the country, Ohio has tilted Republican in the last two presidential elections, and Republicans control all levels of government. Senate candidates from both parties have been aggressively courting the white working-class voters who have left the Democratic Party in droves since Mr. Trump was first on the ballot in 2016.The campaign has been at times contentious and ugly. It has also been high-priced. Cash has poured into the race — from major super PACs and from candidates’ personal coffers — making it one of the most expensive of this election cycle. Major donors include the Protect Ohio Values PAC, largely funded by the billionaire Peter Thiel, who is supporting Mr. Vance, and the Buckeye Leadership Fund, which is backing Matt Dolan, a former Ohio state senator whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team.Indiana’s primary also features some notable elections with implications for the direction of the Republican Party. This year, more incumbents at the state level are facing primary challengers from the right than in at least a decade, according to a review by The Indianapolis Star, potentially resulting in an even more conservative legislative supermajority.North of Indianapolis, in Hamilton County, the re-election campaign of the prosecutor D. Lee Buckingham against Greg Garrison, a conservative talk-show host, is garnering outsize attention: Mr. Garrison has the support of former Vice President Mike Pence.Former President Donald J. Trump at a rally in Delware, Ohio last month.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesTrump’s role as kingmakerMr. Trump rocked the Senate race landscape in Ohio last month when he threw his highly coveted endorsement behind J.D. Vance. A venture capitalist and the author of the best-selling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance has been heavily backed by Mr. Thiel, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr.On the campaign trail, Mr. Vance has sought to atone for his past negative comments about Mr. Trump. Polls have shown a significant bump for Mr. Vance, but no clear front-runner has emerged.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The 2022 election season is underway. See the full primary calendar and a detailed state-by-state breakdown.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.David McIntosh’s anti-tax Club for Growth, which had first opposed Mr. Trump’s 2016 before supporting him, is pitching for a battle. The G.O.P. group has put its support behind Josh Mandel, a former Ohio state treasurer, who went from reluctant Trump supporter in 2016 to one of the nation’s most ardent backers of Trumpism.Other Republican Senate hopefuls include Jane Timken, a former chairwoman of the Ohio Republican Party, who has been endorsed by Mr. Portman and has campaigned with the former Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, and Mike Gibbons, a financier who has outspent all of the candidates in the race. He has at times been at the top of the polls with a sales pitch similar to Mr. Trump’s, reminding audiences he is not a politician but a businessman.Still, Ohio voters might decide they do not want a Trump-centered candidate at all. The only Republican running in this lonely lane has been Mr. Dolan, who says he supports Mr. Trump but has made him less of a focus in the campaign. Unlike the top candidates in the race, he recognizes President Biden as the nation’s legitimate leader.Is there an ‘exhausted majority’?On the Democratic side of the Senate race, Representative Tim Ryan is considered the front-runner. He faces a challenge from the left by Morgan Harper, a progressive lawyer and a senior adviser at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under former President Barack Obama.Mr. Ryan has been visiting with voters across the state in a bet that they have had enough of the extremism in American politics and might be willing to elect a Democrat to a seat formerly held by a Republican. He is seeking to appeal to the “exhausted majority,” a phrase coined by researchers to describe the estimated two-thirds of voters who are less polarized and who feel overlooked.It will be interesting to see if such an electorate manifests itself in Ohio — and if it goes for Mr. Ryan or for Mr. Dolan on the other side of the aisle.Success for Mr. Ryan in the fall could carry lessons for Democrats across the Midwest on how to counter the appeal of Trumpism and the erosion of support for the party among the white working-class — voters who once formed a loyal part of the Democratic base.Representative Shontel Brown with supporters in Lakewood, Ohio.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesNina Turner speaks with children during a campaign event in South Euclid, Ohio.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesThe rematch between Nina Turner and Shontel BrownRepresentative Shontel Brown narrowly defeated Nina Turner, a former state senator and a top surrogate for Bernie Sanders, in a Democratic primary last year that was seen as somewhat of a proxy battle between the party’s progressive and establishment wings.The two were vying for a seat vacated by Marcia L. Fudge after President Biden appointed her as the secretary of housing and urban development. The race attracted big Democratic names and millions of dollars, with Ms. Brown, then a Cuyahoga County councilwoman, drawing support from Hillary Clinton and the highest-ranking Black member of the House, James E. Clyburn of South Carolina.This year, major establishment figures have once more endorsed Ms. Brown, including President Biden and Mr. Clyburn. She now also has the backing of the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC.Ms. Turner previously was attacked for taking anti-Israel positions — and for using language that some said echoed anti-Semitic tropes — as well as for a crass denunciation of President Biden. This time around, she has aggressively courted Jewish voters. She has the ground-game support of Our Revolution, a progressive political action organization that emerged from Mr. Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. The group’s 150 volunteers have centered on building support for Ms. Turner through one-on-one conversations with voters.Will Ohio have a shot at a female governor?The former congressman Jim Renacci is one of several Republican candidates who are trying to seize on their party’s internal divisions to unseat G.O.P. governors. But Mr. Renacci seems to be gaining little traction against Gov. Mike DeWine, a longtime Ohio politician who has been working to attract the support of Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters.In the Democratic primary, two former mayors — John Cranley of Cincinnati and Nan Whaley of Dayton — are facing off, with Ms. Whaley seeking to become the first woman elected governor in the state. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      In Ohio Senate Fight, G.O.P. Shows Strains of Its Identity Crisis

      by

      CLEVELAND — The homestretch of Ohio’s contentious Republican Senate primary has revealed a party united in its conviction that American values, indeed the nation’s way of life, are under attack, but divided on whether to embrace a strict isolationism to address its mounting misgivings about global interconnectedness and American leadership abroad.That divide has played out in policy differences — some subtle, others glaring — in the candidates’ approach to the economy, immigration and foreign policy. The strains reflect the broader splits in a party undergoing something of an identity crisis, with ideological conservatives, the old Republican establishment of big business, and the Trump-inspired newer rank and file all pulling in different directions.At the same time, Republicans have been searching for ways to relate to former President Donald J. Trump himself: a few by taking tentative steps away from him, others by falling in line with him wholeheartedly.All of the candidates competing in the primary on Tuesday appear united in their fierce opposition to the Biden administration, as they have sought to paint a nation grappling with rising food and energy prices, a “radical” Democratic Party overreaching on issues of race and gender, and what they describe as apocalyptic conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border.But the world beyond Mexico may be the brightest dividing line in the Republican Party, with conservatives split on what to do about Russian aggression, how far to distance the United States from its traditional alliances, and above all what to do about China, at once the nation’s biggest competitor and one of its largest economic partners.Over the past weeks, Josh Mandel, Ohio’s former treasurer and the onetime front-runner in the Senate primary, attacked a rival, Mike Gibbons, for making money off investments in China. J.D. Vance, the author and venture capital executive, attacked Mr. Mandel for accepting the help of the Club for Growth, the business-backed political group which he said supported business relations with China. And the sole woman in the race, Jane Timken, shares her last name with a company that is synonymous with Ohio manufacturing might — and that includes vast operations out of Shanghai.Whoever wins Tuesday will have to deal with those divisions in the coming general election campaign, especially since the presumed Democratic candidate, Representative Tim Ryan, has no qualms about blasting China while backing U.S. involvement elsewhere.“Voters don’t always have long memories here, especially after a primary campaign, but certainly the anti-China feelings are going to resonate for a long time,” said Paul Beck, a professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University and a longtime Ohio politics watcher. “They are hard-wired.”Divisions over the border are not so stark. Anger at Mexican criminal organizations that are distributing fentanyl to the north has become particularly salient in a state that has been ground zero for the national opioid crisis and experienced some of the country’s highest overdose rates over the past three years.The fence along the U.S.-Mexico border in Sasabe, Ariz.Rebecca Noble/ReutersMr. Vance, who won Mr. Trump’s coveted endorsement, has even suggested, with a straight face but no evidence, that President Biden was intentionally allowing fentanyl into the country because of its potential to kill Republican voters, bringing the issue back to his mother, who as a nurse became addicted to pain medication. Fentanyl deaths did rise sharply in 2021, but they rose sharply in 2020 as well.“My family was very affected and is still very affected by the fentanyl that comes across the U.S. southern border into Ohio and into all parts of our country,” he told an audience in Newark, Ohio, on Saturday. “I believe that if the poison coming across the Mexican border today had been coming across 10 years ago, I would have lost my mother.”Much of the debate and bluster on the border has been lacking in substance and filled with conjecture, with candidates proposing few policy solutions, conflating immigration and crime and resorting to language that dehumanizes unauthorized immigrants.But beneath the hard-right rhetoric, subtle differences can be seen between the pro-business, establishment Republicans of the past and the ascendant hard right.In stump speeches and a much-criticized campaign ad, Mr. Vance has falsely declared that people are entering the country to vote for Democrats. He has said he is in favor of an immigration process that creates legal paths to entering the country based on merit, rather than on familial ties, long a key feature of the nation’s immigration system. And he opposes H-1B visas that allow employers to temporarily hire immigrant workers in various industries.At the other end of the issue is Matt Dolan, an Ohio state senator who has sought to put some distance between himself and the former president. Mr. Dolan, too, talks tough on immigration and the need to stop the flow of fentanyl. But he is just as concerned about economic development, supporting tax cuts, training for workers and reduced regulations for small businesses. And he favors the immigrant work visas, saying businesses rely on them.“We have to secure the border first — that has to be number one,” Mr. Dolan said in an interview last week. “And then improve our legal immigration.”State Senator Matt Dolan met supporters last week at a library opening in Bay Village, Ohio.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesPerhaps the most glaring examples in Ohio of the forces warring within the Republican Party have unfolded over competition with China, the war in Ukraine and American leadership abroad. Again setting himself apart, Mr. Vance has argued against deepening American involvement on Ukraine’s behalf — despite what many see as the gravest threat to world order in decades.Mr. Vance opposed the establishment of a European-led no-fly zone over Ukraine, and has drawn criticism for a statement he made in February in which he said he did not “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” He has since sought to assure audiences he feels Ukrainians’ pain, but has doubled down on his stance against U.S. intervention.“At the end of the day, however tragic we find these images of what is going on in Ukraine, this is not our fight,” Mr. Vance said in a debate last month.The distinctions could also be seen in the surrogates the Ohio candidates brought in to campaign with them in the final stretch.Senator Ted Cruz of Texas campaigning last week in Kettering, Ohio, on behalf of Josh Mandel, a Senate candidate.Brian Kaiser for The New York TimesMr. Mandel chose as his wingman for the final weekend Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who in 2016 was Mr. Trump’s biggest threat and remains fiercely conservative in ways the former president never was. Mr. Cruz has consistently attacked Mr. Biden as weak on foreign policy, going so far as to blame him for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And Mr. Cruz, like Republican congressional leaders, has shied away from some of Mr. Trump’s broader attacks on corporate America — especially the pharmaceutical industry — which often echoed Democratic talking points.Mr. Vance, by contrast, stumped over the weekend with two of the most polarizing figures of the far right: Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida. Ms. Greene railed against the “forever wars” started under George W. Bush and talked up what she called “the civil war in the G.O.P.,” while Mr. Gaetz blasted the leaders of his own party and said he and Ms. Greene needed backup in Washington — backup that Mr. Vance would provide.J.D. Vance, a Senate candidate from Ohio, campaigned last week with Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMr. Gibbons, for his part, campaigned with Senator Rand Paul, the Kentuckian who espouses small government, low taxes and the avoidance of foreign entanglements at all cost. And Mr. Gibbons embraced a fringe movement to hold a constitutional convention aimed at curbing federal power, and mocked the Department of Homeland Security’s new effort to counter disinformation as an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.One area in which there is broad agreement among the party’s Senate candidates is on the conservative values many Ohio Republicans say they hold dear, from old standbys like support for gun rights and opposition to abortion, to current causes like preventing transgender women from playing women’s sports and giving parents greater control over how race and gender are taught in schools.On those issues, consensus among the candidates was so fully realized that voters at events in Cleveland seemed widely split over whom to support, and many were still undecided.In Port Clinton, where Ms. Timken, Mr. Gibbons and Mr. Dolan all worked the crowd at a Knights of Columbus chicken barbecue lunch, Lisa Slobodzian said she was still sifting through her direct mail and studying the candidates’ positions.“I want power back to the people,” said Ms. Slobodzian, 57, a retired national parks ranger and law enforcement specialist, digging into her plate. “They should decide what their kids are taught in schools, and not some government agency.” More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      How Ohio’s Map Will Test J.D. Vance’s Political Allure

      by

      Behind the wild language, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author’s bid for a Senate seat follows a traditional Republican playbook.Theodore Roosevelt, a renowned political animal and polymath, once said, “I think there is only one thing in the world I can’t understand, and that is Ohio politics.”It is indeed a complicated place, shaped by its history as America’s first frontier state. Since the country’s founding, Ohio has been settled over the years by various ethnic groups searching for prosperity west of the Appalachian Mountains. Once a bellwether in American politics, Ohio is losing that status as its population grows older, whiter and more culturally conservative. But its patchwork of wildly different regions makes it a fascinating state to watch regardless.“Ohio is one of those places whose narrative is more often told from the outside rather than from within,” said David Giffels, the author of “Barnstorming Ohio,” a book on the state’s political and cultural geography.“We are the boring middle of American politics,” Giffels added. “And I do mean that in a loving way.”Ohio’s major population centers form a diagonal axis that slashes across the state from Cleveland in the northeast through Columbus down to Cincinnati in the southwest, along the I-71 corridor. There are as many as 12 media markets in the state, whose population of 11.8 million people sprawls across nearly 45,000 square miles.As a result, said Kyle Kondik, an election forecaster and author of a book about Ohio politics, “there’s not really a strong center to the vote in the state.”Ohio is holding primary elections on Tuesday that will give us the first major electoral test of Donald Trump’s influence on the Republican Party since he left office. By endorsing J.D. Vance in the state’s Republican Senate primary, Trump has single-handedly vaulted Mr. Vance, the venture capitalist and celebrity author, to the front of a crowded field.A forecast for low turnoutBut Vance’s victory in the primary is no sure thing. Although the candidates have spent nearly $70 million bludgeoning one another on television, voters don’t seem to be especially motivated by the chance to pick a replacement for Senator Rob Portman, who is retiring. Turnout in the race is expected to be low.“With Trump not on the ballot, I don’t think this race is top of mind for most voters,” said Thomas Sutton, the director of the Community Research Institute at Baldwin Wallace University, which conducts polls of Ohio voters.That could help Matt Dolan, a traditional Republican who is likely to draw support from party regulars and upper-income voters in the suburbs. Under this theory, casual voters who may be swayed by Trump’s late endorsement of Vance are less likely to show up.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The 2022 election season is underway. See the full primary calendar and a detailed state-by-state breakdown.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.Dolan allies suggest, too, that because the other candidates will divide the hard-core Trump vote among themselves, Dolan, a state senator whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians, has an opportunity to eke out a plurality of the vote by scooping up more casual Trump fans. They also speculate that Gov. Mike DeWine’s strength in the primary for governor could lift Dolan among rank-and-file Republicans.Mike Murphy, a former Republican consultant, said that because Dolan hadn’t been the subject of many attack ads, “he’s become the fresh face in the closing moments after the rest have a ton of damage, both self-inflicted and from paid media.”Trump held a rally last month in Delaware, Ohio, a city north of Columbus.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesThe five states of OhioMost analysts of Ohio divide the state into five regions: Northeast, around Cleveland; Northwest, including Toledo and the prosperous farmlands around it; Central, the booming areas in and around Columbus; Southeast, the Appalachian part of the state; and Southwest, dominated by Cincinnati and its suburbs.The Northeast is Ohio’s Democratic stronghold, the most populous, most industrialized and most diverse part of the state. But it’s also home to tens of thousands of Republican voters, so the candidates have all campaigned and advertised heavily in the region.The Southwest, which includes Vance’s hometown, Middletown, is the traditional center of Republican politics in Ohio. More Southern in perspective, it is full of bedrock Republican voters: conventional in their cultural outlook, they tend to favor free enterprise and worry about issues like crime, drugs and immigration. Vance, who now lives in Cincinnati, is holding his election night party in the city.The Southeast has been a swing area in Ohio politics, though it is also the least diverse at nearly 95 percent white. Hobbled by job losses and buffeted by the forces of globalization and economic modernization, with a lower percentage of people with college degrees, Ohio’s Appalachian region is full of “people who are angry at the world,” said John C. Green, the emeritus director of the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron.As a result, Green said, the region has a “much higher tolerance for the rough and tumble of politics” — and could gravitate toward Josh Mandel, who has campaigned as much on attitude as he has on any particular conservative ideas. A super PAC backing Mandel has been running ads on rural radio stations in the area attacking Vance as “a fraud.”In the 2016 Republican presidential primary, the Ohio map divided sharply between John Kasich, who was the sitting governor at the time, and Trump, who would of course go on to win the Republican nomination and the presidency. Kasich won Ohio’s most populous counties on his way to carrying the state, while Trump cleaned up in the Appalachian communities along the Ohio River.Vance’s balancing actOne question on the minds of many Ohio watchers: How will college-educated Republicans respond to Vance?Will they flock to the Yale-educated, worldly investor lurking inside the angry MAGA warrior Vance has become? Or will they be repelled by how far right he has moved to court Trump’s base?Vance’s schedule and ad spending in the last few days of the race show a focus on suburban and small-town areas. Since Saturday, he has visited Circleville, a city south of Columbus; Cuyahoga Falls, a city north of Akron; Westlake, a suburb west of Cleveland; Dublin, a northwestern suburb of Columbus; and Mason, a northeastern suburb of Cincinnati.A super PAC supporting Vance, Protect American Values, has spent heavily on TV advertisements in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati, as well as Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown.“On the surface, it looks like the campaign is pursuing middle-of-the-road Republican voters,” Green said.It’s a deceptively conventional strategy that you would hardly expect from the protagonist of “Hillbilly Elegy” — a story of rural communities wracked by poverty, drug addiction and what he called “learned helplessness.” Back in 2016, Vance was urging Americans to seize their own destiny, as he did by transcending his troubled childhood.“We’re no longer a country that believes in human agency, and as a formerly poor person, I find it incredibly insulting,” he said in one interview.In this campaign, Vance has courted the support of far-right characters who traffic in conspiracy theories and invective like Steve Bannon and Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. In recent days, he has accused President Biden of deliberately flooding Ohio with fentanyl, a preposterous charge without evidence.“In a way,” Giffels said, “he’s kind of selling the victimhood he railed against in the book.”What to readFrom Columbus, Ohio, our colleague Trip Gabriel reports on what’s next for Josh Mandel, a Republican whose Senate campaign has been defined by his support of Donald Trump, now that Trump has endorsed someone else.A second woman has publicly accused Charles Herbster, a Republican candidate for governor in Nebraska who has Trump’s backing, of groping her.Even as Biden enjoyed high approval ratings early in his presidency, his lead pollster warned that immigration and inflation could cost him support.With six months until the midterms, Democrats are deeply divided over how to connect with voters and brighten the party’s prospects, Katie Glueck reports.how they runSenator Joe Manchin, left, with Representative David McKinley last year in Morgantown, W.Va.Michael Swensen/Getty ImagesManchin wades into a G.O.P. primary in West VirginiaIt’s not often that you see a Democrat endorse a Republican candidate. But the usual political bets are off in West Virginia.Republicans hold all three of the state’s House seats. But after West Virginia lost a district in the once-a-decade reapportionment process, there’s room for only two of them in the next Congress. That has left two Republican congressmen, Alex Mooney and David McKinley, fighting for the new Second District.Over the weekend, Senator Joe Manchin, the nation’s most famous right-leaning Democrat, announced in an ad that he was supporting McKinley, a longtime West Virginia politician and engineer by trade who was first elected to Congress in 2010. The primary is May 10.The endorsement adds another layer to an incumbent-on-incumbent race that has already become a proxy war of sorts. Donald Trump endorsed Mooney, while his former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, endorsed McKinley. Manchin joins Gov. Jim Justice — a Republican who left the Democratic Party after Trump was elected — in endorsing McKinley. Mooney, notably, is seen as a potential Senate challenger to Manchin in 2024.Mooney has a similar résumé to McKinley’s, although across state lines. He spent a decade in Maryland’s Legislature before leading its state Republican Party, history that has provided McKinley with alliterative fodder in his attack ads against “Maryland Mooney.”Both men are campaigning on typical Republican talking points, like immigration and gun rights. But they’ve dedicated most of their television ads to attacking each other, trading accusations of working with Democrats and betraying Trump.Perhaps twisting the knife for his Democratic critics, Manchin praised McKinley in his ad for rejecting what was once the centerpiece of President Biden’s social policy agenda — an agenda, of course, that was doomed in part by Manchin’s opposition.“For Alex Mooney and his out-of-state supporters to suggest David McKinley supported Build Back Better is an outright lie,” Manchin says to the camera.At the same time, Manchin is supporting one of the few Republicans who supported the Biden administration’s signature legislative achievement. McKinley was one of just a dozen Republicans who voted for Biden’s infrastructure legislation last year.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      The Don Jr. Road Show in Ohio Was No Joke

      by

      WEST CHESTER, OHIO — It’s a chilly, drizzly evening, but Donald Trump Jr. is putting on a red-hot show at Lori’s Roadhouse, a bar and music joint in a strip mall on the outskirts of Cincinnati. Pretending to be a befuddled, senile President Biden, Don Jr. staggers around the low stage, eyes unfocused, making confused gestures and blundering into the giant red-white-and-blue backdrop.The crowd, a couple of hundred MAGA fans and local Republican players, laps up the wickedness. This is Don Jr.’s last public appearance of the day on behalf of J.D. Vance, whose Senate candidacy was recently endorsed by Trump Sr. As at earlier stops, the audience whoops and laughs and hollers “Amen!” as Trump the Younger slashes at a series of targets: Democrats, the media, RINOs (Senator Mitt Romney is taking a serious beating), Big Tech, America’s “stupid” military leaders and so on.Don Jr. clearly inherited the family flair for showmanship. (Democrats would do well to keep an eye on his political development. In particular, the ladies here are gaga over him.) He deploys funny voices and goofy faces, his comic timing is spot on, and he has a vicious streak untempered by decency or accuracy. “The other side has literally taken the stance that it’s OK to be a groomer,” he charges, promoting the MAGAworld calumny that Democrats are pro-pedophile. Even on this dark topic he draws laughs by marveling that, in his younger days, “being antipedophile was something that we could all agree on!”Off to the side, chuckling awkwardly, hands jammed into his jeans pockets, stands Mr. Vance. Tall and burly, with carefully manicured facial hair, the candidate has already done his quick opening act and faded into the background like a good sidekick. He gazes attentively at the former president’s son, nodding appreciatively, clapping and grinning at all the appropriate (or, rather, inappropriate) moments. He takes out his phone to snap the occasional photo. Once or twice, he shoots a glance at the audience, as if to see how this show is playing. (Answer: very well.) Distinctly overshadowed, Mr. Vance is aware that, while his name may be on the yard signs and stickers spread around the bar, he is not who most folks have come to see.Because Mr. Vance is no longer the star of his own race to win Tuesday’s Republican primary in Ohio for U.S. Senate. The moment he got the much-coveted Trump tap on April 15, the election became about one thing only: whether the former president has the juice to propel an unexceptional candidate to victory.Mark Peterson for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s kingmaking ability is, in fact, the Big Question facing the entire G.O.P. this election cycle. Ohio is just the first test, the first time voters go to the polls in a race where the former president has put his political credibility and influence so solidly on the ballot. Mr. Vance is arguably a perfect test case for Mr. Trump: weak enough to need a boost but with enough potential to make him a worthwhile risk. Anyone still hoping to see the Trumpified G.O.P. return to sanity any time soon should be rooting for Mr. Vance to fail.The contest to replace Senator Rob Portman, who is retiring, was already among this cycle’s rowdiest and most expensive. Multiple conservatives have been jockeying to present themselves as the most MAGA-rific, with party players and moneymen picking favorites. Among the many contenders, Jane Timken, a former state Republican Party chairwoman, has been endorsed by multiple senators (Mr. Portman, Shelley Moore Capito, Joni Ernst and Deb Fischer) and denizens of Trumpworld (Kellyanne Conway, David Bossie and Corey Lewandowski). Josh Mandel, a former state treasurer, is backed by Senator Ted Cruz, the Club for Growth and Ohio Value Voters.Until recently, Mr. Vance had not been doing so well. Best known as the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” his 2016 memoir widely embraced as a blue-staters’ guide to red-state values and grievances, his past was a bit too checkered for some conservatives. He attended Yale Law. He worked as a venture capitalist. Most damning, he was an avowed Never Trumper during the 2016 presidential election — and we’re not talking gentle criticisms. He called Mr. Trump “noxious,” “reprehensible,” “an idiot” and “cultural heroin”; fretted over Trumpism’s racist elements; and privately suggested Mr. Trump was “America’s Hitler.”Like so much of the party, Mr. Vance has changed his tune, now prostrating himself before Mr. Trump with as much zeal as anyone. (Except maybe Kevin McCarthy. That level of sycophancy is something special.) Even so, rolling into April, Mr. Vance’s campaign chest was light (despite the generosity of his former boss, the tech billionaire Peter Thiel), and polls showed him lagging other conservatives, including Mr. Mandel, who has made his own dash to the hard right in recent years.Mr. Trump has said he chose to bless Mr. Vance because “we have to pick somebody that can win.” Why he decided Mr. Vance is that somebody has prompted head scratching. Certainly, there is nothing the former president enjoys as much as watching a former adversary grovel, and Mr. Vance has been happy to gush about how wrong he was in 2016 and what a great president Mr. Trump turned out to be. (Best of his lifetime!) Mr. Trump may have been swayed by Mr. Vance’s admirers, notably Don Jr., Tucker Carlson and Mr. Thiel, a megadonor to Mr. Trump as well as to Mr. Vance. Mr. Trump is said to have been put off by an ugly confrontation between Mr. Mandel and another candidate during a debate in March.Mr. Trump may also be taken with Mr. Vance’s quasi-fame and frequent TV appearances. The former president has a longstanding love affair with celebrities — and, perhaps better than anyone, grasps the value of celebrity in electoral politics.Whatever its roots, Mr. Trump’s endorsement hit the Ohio race like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, spreading chaos and carnage. Mr. Mandel’s supporters have taken it particularly hard, slagging Mr. Vance as an opportunist and Mr. Trump’s endorsement as, at best, ill informed.John Stover, the head of Ohio Value Voters, “firmly” believes the decision was heavily influenced by Mr. Thiel. Mr. Stover speculated to me recently: Who knows what exactly “came up” during the billionaire money man’s pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago?Before the former president and Mr. Vance appeared together at a rally in central Ohio a week ago Saturday, Mr. Stover’s group called on supporters to boycott the event. Alternatively, attendees were encouraged to boo when Mr. Vance was introduced. The group’s call to arms included a laundry list of the candidate’s past criticisms of Mr. Trump.The Club for Growth also finds itself feuding with Mr. Trump over its refusal to abandon Mr. Mandel. One of the group’s ads spotlighting Mr. Vance’s past attacks on Mr. Trump prompted the former president to have an aide fire off an obscene text to the group’s president, David McIntosh. The organization has doubled down with even more ad spending.Team Vance’s mission has been to hawk his status as “the only Trump-endorsed candidate” in the race. This is the verbatim message of a new TV ad running in the state, and it was one of the first things out of Don Jr.’s mouth at Lori’s Roadhouse.Even Mr. Vance seems to understand that what is at stake here has little to do with him.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      In Trump’s Shadow, Republicans Campaign Ahead of Ohio Primary

      by

      Donald Trump’s endorsement of the author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance has shaken up the Republican race for the first major Senate midterm election.COLUMBUS, Ohio — Josh Mandel’s wager was simple: No one would outflank him in mirroring Donald J. Trump, either on hard-right America First positions or the bellicose, come-at-me style of the former president.So, Mr. Mandel said of Black Lives Matter activists, “They are the racists, not us.” He stirred animosity toward migrants, including refugees from Afghanistan, and falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump. The Jewish grandson of a Holocaust survivor whose website features a Christian cross, Mr. Mandel stumped mostly in evangelical churches, claiming “there’s no such thing” as separation of church and state.For a long time, it worked. Mr. Mandel was the presumed front-runner in the crowded Republican field for U.S. senator from Ohio.But two weeks ago, the one person he sought most to impress — the former president himself — spurned Mr. Mandel, a former state treasurer, and bestowed his coveted endorsement on J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author, remaking the race overnight.Mr. Vance, who had been trailing in polls and running low on money, has seen a surge in donations and support since Mr. Trump’s embrace, as the first major Senate midterm primary election entered its final weekend before Tuesday’s voting.And around the state, Republicans including Mr. Mandel; Mr. Vance; Mike Gibbons, a self-funded businessman; and State Senator Matt Dolan fanned out in a preview of national G.O.P. politics to come — different moons circling Mr. Trump’s sun.On Saturday, Mr. Vance campaigned with two far-right members of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida. Mr. Mandel hopscotched across the state’s big cities — Toledo, Columbus and Cincinnati — with a conservative ally of his own, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.To longtime acquaintances and observers of Mr. Mandel, 44, who early in his career promoted civility and bipartisanship, his unrequited embrace of Trumpism and divisiveness suggested there was a price on political calculation.“I see the desperation there these last few months,” said Matt Cox, a former Republican operative who was an early adviser to Mr. Mandel before a falling-out. “I think his strategy was: All right, Trump won Ohio by eight points twice. All I have to do to become the nominee is to become the most like Trump.”The candidate most left on the sidelines since Mr. Trump’s nod at Mr. Vance, according to polls, has been Jane Timken. The only woman running, Ms. Timken was endorsed by Ohio’s retiring senator, Rob Portman, a center-right throwback to an earlier Ohio G.O.P. who voted with Senate Democrats for the bipartisan infrastructure bill.The Senate candidate and former Republican state chair, Jane Timken, has been endorsed by Senator Rob Portman, who is vacating his seat. Gaelen Morse/ReutersMs. Timken has solid Trump-era credentials — she chaired the state party while Mr. Trump was in office — but she does not mimic the former president’s aggrieved style, which has been a key to unlocking the most fervent Republican voters. She has set herself apart from rivals who she says seek every day to get themselves “canceled on Twitter” with their statements and antics.In a debate in March, Mr. Mandel nearly got into a physical confrontation with Mr. Gibbons.At a Baptist church in Columbus on Saturday, Mr. Mandel took aim at popular targets of the right, including transgender people, Republicans with “jelly knees” like Senator Mitt Romney of Utah and the “liberal media in the back of the room” (just minutes after greeting reporters amicably by name in a private room).Fitting the setting, the largely older crowd in the pews called out encouraging “amens!” or groaned audibly when Mr. Mandel named enemies.“The reason that we’re going to win on Tuesday is because we have this army of Christian warriors throughout the state,’’ he pledged.One pastor present, Dan Wolvin, said he “felt sorry” for Mr. Trump over the Vance endorsement, saying he was “listening to the wrong people.” Still, Mr. Wolvin predicted the Trump nod would gain Mr. Vance “about five points” on Election Day, while conceding, “it’s a lot for Josh to make up.”Spurned or not, Mr. Mandel was still flying the Trump flag.“I supported President Trump yesterday. I support him today, and I’ll continue to support him tomorrow,” he said. He predicted the former president would return to the White House, “and I look forward to working with him.”The candidates, to varying degrees, all concur. Here are snapshots from around Ohio in the last weekend of campaigning.J.D. Vance in Newark, OhioJ.D. Vance campaigned with two far-right members of Congress, Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida. Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesJ.D. Vance, the author and venture capitalist, bounded onto the stage at the Trout Club in Newark, Ohio, with the confidence of the nominal front-runner, a status bestowed by Mr. Trump’s endorsement on April 15.The crowd of about 75 in the bar and restaurant of a well-manicured country club had been warmed up by Mr. Gaetz and Ms. Greene, who ticked through the talking points of the fringe right: “medical tyranny,” “open borders,” “gender pediatric clinics” turning boys into girls, men in women’s bathrooms and women’s sports, The Walt Disney Company “grooming” children into homosexuals and transgender people.Mr. Vance breezed through some of the same themes, but he appeared more intent on previewing the larger issues he planned to argue in the general election to come.He castigated both parties for free trade agreements that he said had sent Ohio manufacturing to Mexico and China, for the “bipartisan decision to allow American Wall Street firms to get rich off the growth of China and not off the growth of the American middle class.” He also accused financial firms of allowing “the Chinese into this country, buying up our farmland, buying up our single-family homes, making it impossible for young families to buy a home, to own a stake in their own country.”“That is the game they play, and I’m running for the U.S. Senate to go and play a different game, a game where we put our citizens and the people in this room first,” he said to cheers.The people in that room — just off a verdant golf course, far away from the illegal immigrant, drug-infested cities that Mr. Vance speaks of on the stump — were hardly the down-and-out white workers central to his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” But an unspoken truth is, his audience is the true core of the pro-Trump vote in Ohio. The one income group that President Biden won in this state in 2020 was that of voters who earn less than $50,000. More affluent voters went for Mr. Trump.But economic themes in general — and the China threat in particular — resonated.“That’s in the DNA in Ohio,” said Representative Tim Ryan, the likely Democratic nominee for the coming Senate race.Mr. Vance was asked by a reporter why he invited Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz to barnstorm through Ohio with him on the closing weekend of the primary campaign.“There is nothing more disgusting in politics than the way that leadership asks you to stab your friends in the back,” he said before heading with them to West Chester, outside Cincinnati. He added for emphasis, “I’m not going to disavow them because some scumbag who doesn’t have the best interest of Ohio at heart wants me to.”Jonathan WeismanMike Gibbons in Dublin, OhioMike Gibbons pumped nearly $17 million of his own money into the race. Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesMr. Gibbons likes to sport a navy blue suit coat and red tie reminiscent of Mr. Trump. He has a habit of reminding voters that he is a businessman, not a politician. And he speaks often of how, in 1989, he started his investment banking and financial advisory firm in a small Cleveland office with nothing but a desk and a phone.But imitation did not win Mr. Gibbons the endorsement of the former president he so sought to emulate, and he is closing out the final stretch of the primary much the way he started: with his own gumption and personal wealth.In an interview on his campaign bus Saturday, Mr. Gibbons emphasized his lifelong Ohio roots and business credentials as the best fit for Ohio voters.“I was shocked,” Mr. Gibbons said of Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Vance, referring to his opponent as someone who “flew in from the West Coast.” He added: “Ohioans should be insulted.”Outside, a couple of volunteers mingled in a grocery store parking lot near Columbus, picking up Gibbons swag and eating pizza, before fanning out to knock on doors.Mr. Gibbons grew up in Parma, a working-class suburb outside of Cleveland. He was a one-time professional football player, and at 37, he founded Brown Gibbons Lang & Company. He ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 2018, and this time has pumped roughly $17 million into his campaign, making him the largest self-funder in the race.He drew some scrutiny in March for comments he made in 2013 on China and Asian people that used offensive stereotypes and was later criticized for the heated debate stage encounter with Mr. Mandel.Mr. Gibbons served as Mr. Trump’s Ohio fundraising co-chair in 2016. But in one crucial way, his supporters say, his path has sharply diverged from Mr. Trump’s: Mr. Gibbons did not receive a multimillion-dollar loan from his father to launch his business empire.“I like that he is from Parma, Ohio — real down-to-earth kind of guy who worked hard for everything he has in life and earned his way,” said Michael Palcisko, 54, a schoolteacher and military veteran in Cleveland.Jazmine Ulloa and Kevin WilliamsMatt Dolan in North Royalton, Ohio Unlike the other leading Republican candidates in the race, State Senator Matt Dolan acknowledges President Biden is the nation’s legitimate leader.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesOn an overcast Saturday morning, Mr. Dolan knocked on doors in an affluent suburb just south of Cleveland. He was making a last-minute push to get voters to the polls, and on his target list were registered Republicans who had yet to cast a ballot. But on his route, he was just as likely to encounter Democrats and independents who were backing his candidacy — or simply cheering him on.“If it has to be a Republican, I hope it is you,” Rich Evans, 69, a retired educator, told him, as he stopped manicuring his lawn to shake hands.From the beginning, Mr. Dolan, who has served in the statehouse since 2017 and whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team, has been walking in his own lonely lane. He is the only Republican candidate who supports Mr. Trump but has attempted to put some distance between himself and Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump “did a lot of good things for Ohio,” Mr. Dolan said. But he said he wanted his own campaign to remain focused on Ohio. He wanted to get back to discussing policy, and he certainly did not want to re-litigate the last election.“I am not looking backwards,” he said.Like the other Republicans in the race, he said he wants to secure the border, cut the flow of fentanyl into the state and tackle inflation. But he also said he could do more than his competitors to bring workers to the state and put together a unique economic development agenda.He’s hardly a never Trumper. He said he voted for Mr. Trump in the last presidential election, opposed both impeachment cases against him and has said he would support the former president should he become the 2024 Republican nominee.But on Jan. 6, Mr. Dolan did not shy away from criticizing Mr. Trump for spreading lies about the results of the November 2020 election, writing on Twitter, “Real leaders lead not manipulate.” Unlike the other leading Republican candidates in the race, he also acknowledges President Biden is the nation’s legitimate leader.It was a stance that Pat Ryan, 64, said he respected. Standing at his front door, Ryan, who considers himself a Democrat, said he planned to vote in the Republican primary this year because of Mr. Dolan. “I looked at all the candidates, and he’s the most honest one,” he said.Jazmine Ulloa More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      The Ohio Primary and the Return of the Republican Civil War

      by

      Why has the Ohio Republican Senate primary, which reaches its conclusion Tuesday, been so interesting (if not always edifying) to watch? In part, because it’s the first time the divides of the party’s 2016 primary campaign have risen fully to the surface again.Six years ago, under the pressure of Donald Trump’s insurgency, the G.O.P. split into three factions. First was the party establishment, trying to sustain a business-friendly and internationalist agenda and an institutionalist approach to governance. This was the faction of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, much the party’s Washington D.C. leadership — but fewer of its media organs and activists.Those groups mostly supported the more movement-driven, True Conservative faction — the faction of Ted Cruz, the Tea Party, the House Freedom Caucus, talk radio. This faction was more libertarian and combative, and richer in grassroots support — but not as rich as it thought.That’s because Trump himself forged a third faction, pulling together a mixture of populists and paleoconservatives, disaffected voters who didn’t share True Conservatism’s litmus tests and pugilists who just wanted someone to fight liberal cultural dominance, with no agenda beyond the fight itself.When Trump, astonishingly, won the presidency, you might have expected these factions to feud openly throughout his chaotic administration. But that’s not exactly what happened. Part of the establishment faction — mostly strategists and pundits — broke from the party entirely. The larger part, the Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and Nikki Haley camp, essentially ran policy in the early Trump era — passing tax reform, running the national security bureaucracy, bemoaning Trump’s tweets while setting much of his agenda.The movement faction, Tea Partyers and TrueCons, was given personnel appointments, the chance to write irrelevant budget proposals, and eventually a degree of personal power, through figures like Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows. (Trump clearly just liked the Freedom Caucus guys, whatever their ideological differences.) The populists, meanwhile, won some victories on immigration policy and trade, while complaining about the “deep state” on almost every other front.But because both the TrueCons and the populists delighted in Trump’s pugilism — even unto his election-overturning efforts in 2020 — it could be hard to see where one faction ended and the next began. And this pattern often held in Trump-era Republican primary battles, in which candidates with TrueCon or establishment backgrounds recast themselves as Trumpists by endorsing his grievances and paranoias.But in the Ohio Senate primary, finally, you can see the divisions clearly once again. First you have a candidate, Matt Dolan, who is fully in the establishment lane, explicitly refusing to court Trumpian favor and trying to use the Russian invasion of Ukraine to peel Republicans away from the America First banner.You have a candidate in the TrueCon lane, the adaptable Josh Mandel, who tried to hug Trump personally but who draws his support from the old powers of movement conservatism — from the Club for Growth to talk radio’s Mark Levin to the political consultancy that runs Ted Cruz’s campaigns.And you have J.D. Vance, who is very clear about trying to be a populist in full — taking the Trump-in-2016 line on trade and immigration and foreign policy, allying himself with thinkers and funders who want a full break with the pre-Trump G.O.P.Given this division, it’s significant that Trump decided to endorse Vance, and that his most politically active scion, Donald Jr., is enthusiastic for the “Hillbilly Elegy” author. It’s also significant that Trump’s endorsement hasn’t prevented the Club for Growth from continuing to throw money against Vance, prompting blowback from Trump himself. For the first time since 2016, there’s a clear line not just between Trump and the establishment but between Trumpian populism and movement conservatism.That line will blur again once the primary is settled. But the battle for Ohio suggests things to look for in 2022 and beyond. First, expect a Trump revival to be more like his 2016 insurgent-populist campaign than his incumbent run in 2020. Second, expect populism writ large to gain some strength and substance but still remain bound to Trump’s obsessions (and appetite for constitutional crisis).Third, expect many of the movement and TrueCon figures who made their peace with Trump six years ago to be all-in for Ron DeSantis should he seem remotely viable. Fourth, expect the remains of the establishment to divide over whether to rally around a candidate of anti-Trump principle — from Liz Cheney to certain incarnations of Mike Pence — or to make their peace with a harder-edged figure like DeSantis.Finally, expect a potential second Trump presidency to resemble the scramble for his endorsement in Ohio: the establishment left out in the cold, no Reince Priebus running the White House or McConnell setting its agenda, but just constant policy battles between movement conservatives and populists, each claiming to embody the true and only Trumpism and hoping that the boss agrees.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Ahead of Senate Primary Election, Ohio Republicans Embrace the Bombast

      by

      The slugfest for the Republican nomination for Ohio’s open Senate seat has buried the brand of good-natured, country-club conservatism that was once a hallmark of the state.COLUMBUS, Ohio — Republicans running for the seat of Ohio’s retiring senator, Rob Portman, appear determined to bury the soft-spoken country-club bonhomie that was once a hallmark of the party in this state, and replace it with the pugilistic brand of conservatism owned by Donald J. Trump and now amplified by the new band of Buckeye bomb throwers.The race descended into a brutal slugfest as the leading candidates, the author-turned-venture capitalist J.D. Vance, the former state treasurer Josh Mandel and a self-funded businessman, Mike Gibbons, entered the final weekend before Tuesday’s primaries accusing one another of being insufficiently right-wing or disloyal to the man in Mar-a-Lago.Ohio used to be known for the quiet conservatism of the state’s celebrated former senator George Voinovich and its current governor, Mike DeWine; for the Merlot-swilling happy-warrior days of the former House speaker John A. Boehner; for the moderation of John Kasich, a two-term governor; and for the free-trade, free-market ideology of Mr. Portman himself.Instead, affections for such Ohio leaders are now being weaponized — in broadsides from the candidates and advertisements by their allies — as evidence that rivals are paying only lip service to Mr. Trump and his angry populism.“Josh Mandel: Another failed career politician squish,” a new ad from a super PAC supporting Mr. Vance blared on Ohio television sets on Friday, calling Mr. Mandel, who is mounting his third Senate run, a “two-time loser” and “a moderate for the moderates.”After so much vitriol, Ohio’s primary will begin to shed light on just how much power the former president can still wield from his exile. But in the final days of campaigning, the leading contenders left no doubt about his ideological hold on the party.At an evangelical church near Dayton on Friday, Mr. Mandel campaigned with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who sought to blunt the impact of Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Vance two weeks ago. “At the end of the day, it’s not going to come down to who endorsed whom,” Mr. Cruz said before he and Mr. Mandel brought an older crowd to its feet with stem-winding paeans to conservatism and criticism of Democrats.How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.A Modern-Day Party Boss: Hoarding cash, doling out favors and seeking to crush rivals, Mr. Trump is behaving like the head of a 19th-century political machine.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.Some in the crowd of more than 100 worried that the endorsement of Mr. Vance had significantly lowered Mr. Mandel’s odds of victory. “I think it went down quite a bit,” said Paul Markowski, a retired police officer in a Trump 2020 cap. He said he had not forgiven Mr. Vance for comments he made in 2016 denouncing Mr. Trump and saying that some of his support was driven by racism.“I could get over him not supporting Trump,” Mr. Markowski said. “But when he bad-mouthed us, the voters, that pissed me off.”Mr. Vance, for his part, pressed his attack on Mr. Mandel, who had vied for the former president’s endorsement with ads calling himself “pro-God, pro-gun, pro-Trump.” Mr. Vance’s spokeswoman, Taylor Van Kirk, called Mr. Mandel “a phony, fraud and sellout, who claims to be ‘anti-establishment’ in public, but throws President Trump and the entire MAGA movement under the bus to the establishment behind closed doors.”Josh Mandel, a former Ohio treasurer, insists he is the true standard-bearer for Mr. Trump’s “America First” movement.Dustin Franz/Getty ImagesIn turn, the one Republican who has said the party needs to move on from the former president, State Senator Matt Dolan, castigated Mr. Vance for bringing members of the party’s extremist wing, Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida, into the state on Saturday — not because of their extreme positions, but because they are “outsiders” who are “telling Ohioans how they should vote.”In the rush to the right, Mr. Gibbons, who had styled himself a businessman in Mr. Trump’s mold and was once the front-runner in the Senate contest, pledged his fealty to a right-wing movement, called the Convention of States, to rewrite the Constitution to restrain federal power.All of the major candidates in the Republican Senate primary have insisted they are the true conservatives in the race, but only one, Mr. Vance, has the official imprimatur of the former president. That means the judgment that Republican voters render on Tuesday will go a long way to show whether even conservative candidates like Mr. Mandel and Mr. Gibbons can overcome a cold shoulder from Mar-a-Lago.“President Trump is a major factor in this state,” said Alex Triantafilou, the longtime chairman of the Hamilton County Republican Party, which includes Cincinnati. “He just is. He still motivates our base in a way that some people think is waning, but it’s not from my perspective.”Still, to call Tuesday’s Republican primary a referendum on the future of Trumpism — in Ohio and beyond — would go too far. The state’s low-key Republican governor, Mr. DeWine, does not appear to be threatened in his quest for re-election by a primary challenger, Jim Renacci, whose “Putting Ohio First” campaign adopted MAGA themes in its attack on Mr. DeWine’s pandemic-control efforts. Mr. Trump declined to endorse Mr. Renacci, seeing no prospect for victory.The former president’s attacks did chase the one Ohio Republican who voted to impeach him, Representative Anthony Gonzalez, into retirement, and he buoyed a former White House aide, Max Miller, who is running for an Ohio House seat, despite an accusation from one of Mr. Trump’s press secretaries, Stephanie Grisham, that he had physically abused her.But in other contests, such as a heated Republican primary in northwest Ohio, mainstream Republicans are expected to prevail against conservative showmen like J.R. Majewski, who painted his vast backyard into a 19,000-square-foot Trump election sign and posted a video of himself walking through a shuttered factory with an assault-style rifle.In the bellwether Senate race here, however, Mr. Trump’s influence is undeniable. The state was once a reliable birthing ground of center-right Republicans, such as Mr. Portman, Mr. Boehner and Mr. DeWine, who has been in Republican politics for 45 years, as a House member, senator, lieutenant governor, attorney general and governor.But the free-trade, free-market and pro-legal immigration sentiments that were once hallmarks of the party have been washed away by Trumpism.And the Ohio primary will kick off a four-week period that will reveal much about Mr. Trump’s sway with the party — and just how transferable his continued popularity is to others. After Ohio, his preferred picks in Nebraska, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia will all be tested in heated primaries.Mike Gibbons, who styled himself as a businessman in Mr. Trump’s mold, was an early front-runner in the Senate race.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesMr. Vance, buoyed by the endorsement bump and leading in a Fox News poll, is scarcely tacking to the center, confident in the support of the Republican base. On Saturday, he will barnstorm through Ohio with two figures from the right fringe of the party, Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz. On Sunday and Monday, he will be joined on the campaign trail by two other figures firmly in the former president’s camp, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and Charlie Kirk, the bombastic leader of the far-right Turning Point USA.But after trailing in the primary contest for months, Mr. Vance enters the final stretch as something of a front-runner, with the other candidates training their fire on him. Providing air cover for Mr. Mandel, the business-backed political action committee the Club for Growth is broadcasting an advertisement repeating attacks that Mr. Vance made in 2016 against Mr. Trump and his supporters, suggesting the former president made a mistake with his endorsement.A pro-Vance super PAC, heavily funded by Peter Thiel, the Trump-aligned financier that Mr. Vance works for, fired back Friday with an ad running in Columbus, Dayton and Cleveland that portrays Mr. Mandel as a “squish.” Mr. Mandel’s embrace by the Republican nominees for the presidency in 2008 and 2012, John McCain and Mitt Romney, are treated in the advertisement like a scarlet letter, and kind words from Mr. Kasich might as well have come from Nancy Pelosi.“Josh Mandel, he’s for them, not us,” the narrator intones, a clear message that Tuesday’s primary is geared toward the Republican extremes, not the sort of voters who once backed Mr. Kasich and Mr. Romney.Mr. Gibbons, still in the hunt for the nomination, will trot out yet another Trump ally, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, on Monday to attest to his conservative bona fides. In a series of statements on Friday seemingly issued to appeal to the far right, Mr. Gibbons declared that a “dire need of real change” meant he would support a convention to rewrite the Constitution, and said that a new effort by the Department of Homeland Security to combat disinformation would be “a de facto ‘Ministry of Truth’” to crush dissent.Jonathan Weisman reported from Columbus, Ohio, and Trip Gabriel from Dayton. More

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      For J.D. Vance, ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Was the Question, and Trump Was the Answer

      by

      “We are going to break up the big tech companies, ladies and gentlemen, we have to do it,” J.D. Vance hollered at a rally for Donald Trump in Ohio last weekend. “You cannot have a real country if a bunch of corrupt scumbags who take their marching orders from the Communist Chinese tell us what we’re allowed to say and how we’re allowed to say it.”Mr. Vance, a 37-year-old memoirist and venture capitalist who is running in the Republican Senate primary in Ohio, is new to politics. But he was recently fortified by Mr. Trump’s endorsement in a hotly contested race, and his language on that bright and breezy afternoon was suitably bold.Amid a nodding crowd of men and women in Trump T-shirts and MAGA hats, Mr. Vance’s gray suit may have looked a bit funereal, but his applause lines were decidedly un-stodgy. He assailed Joe Biden as a “crazy fake president who will buy energy from Putin and the scumbags of Venezuela but won’t buy it from middle class Ohioans,” who live in a top fracking state.Donald Trump told a frenzied crowd in Ohio in April that J.D. Vance was a “fearless MAGA fighter.”“Scumbag” is a word that seems to have entered Mr. Vance’s public vocabulary only recently. It didn’t appear in “Hillbilly Elegy,” the tender 2016 autobiography in which he described his clannish and troubled Kentucky-descended family.Ohio hillbillies — some of them natives, some of them migrants from Kentucky and West Virginia who manned Ohio’s factories in the last century — are Mr. Vance’s people. He wrote about them in his memoir without condescension or squeamishness: his drug-addicted and erratic mother, who asked him for a cup of his clean urine one morning when she expected to be drug-tested at work; the various boyfriends, husbands, police officers and social workers her misadventures brought into the family’s life; his tenacious grandmother Mamaw, who, as he recalled more recently, “loved the Lord” and “loved the F-word” and owned 19 handguns.These people helped him on his way from the blighted Ohio steel town of Middletown to the Marines, Ohio State and Yale Law School.A television ad for J.D. Vance’s Senate campaign.Published on the eve of the 2016 elections, “Hillbilly Elegy” made Mr. Vance, then 31, a literary sensation. It sold more than three million copies, and is still a staple of high school and college curriculums. Pundits most likely speed-read the book for its sociological “takeaway,” a description of the left-behind whites who then seemed instrumental in rallying the Republican Party behind Mr. Trump and would soon put him in the White House.While the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” retained a lot of the exotic patriotism of his kinfolk, even to the extent of choking up whenever he heard “Proud to Be an American,” he drew the line at their chosen candidate. In spirited interviews, articles, tweets and text messages throughout the 2016 election season, Mr. Vance described Mr. Trump as “reprehensible” and an “idiot.” He didn’t vote for him. Many of Mr. Vance’s cosmopolitan literary admirers must have been consoled to think that discerning citizens could see through Mr. Trump, even in the parts of the country most taken with him.But Mr. Vance backed Mr. Trump in 2020. And now, a week before the Republican primary on May 3, Mr. Trump has traveled to Ohio to tell a frenzied crowd that, even though Mr. Vance once said a lot of nasty things about him, he is a “fearless MAGA fighter” and “a great Buckeye.” And here comes Mr. Vance, bounding onstage to call Mr. Trump “the best president of my lifetime.”Mr. Vance’s readers may feel let down and misled. So too, in their own way, may his Republican primary rivals in Ohio, who have been professing their fidelity to Trumpism, only to see their leader confer his blessing on a Johnny-come-lately. The conservative Club for Growth, which backs the former Ohio treasurer Josh Mandel, has spent millions on campaign ads that replay every Trump-skeptical thing Mr. Vance said half a decade ago. When Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Vance was first rumored, dozens of Mandel allies even petitioned the ex-president to reconsider.Fans of “Hillbilly Elegy” may feel let down by J.D. Vance’s support for Donald Trump.Mr. Vance’s Trumpian turn has left a wide variety of people wondering whether it arises from sincere conversion or cynical calculation. But there is something more complex going on.Readers of “Hillbilly Elegy” who find Mr. Vance’s campaign rhetoric a jarring departure may actually be misremembering the book. His Mamaw railed at the so-called Section 8 federal subsidies that allowed a succession of poor families to move in next door. Southern whites were migrating to the Republican Party, Mr. Vance wrote, in large part because “many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s,” a neighborhood grocery. There, thanks to food stamps, he wrote, “our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.”If Mr. Vance and the people who populate his book were bursting with political impulses, they had as yet no political program, so their impulses meant nothing. Before Donald Trump, there was no place in the country’s political imagination — or its heart — for the poor whites he described. Mr. Trump changed that — nowhere more so than in Ohio. A lot of political gestures today don’t have the same meaning that they did five years ago.J.D. Vance is new to politics. But he was recently fortified by Donald Trump’s endorsement.Ohio has produced seven presidents and, until last fall, had a reputation as an electoral bellwether. In the 14 presidential elections between Lyndon Johnson’s victory in 1964 and Donald Trump’s in 2016, Ohio sided with the winner every time. In Joe Biden’s narrow 2020 victory, however, it lurched wildly to Mr. Trump, giving him an eight-point victory in the state. Some states voted more heavily for Mr. Trump, but none has been more transformed by him.Mr. Vance is running for the Senate seat held for two terms by Rob Portman, a Republican who is retiring, and Mr. Trump’s endorsement has been the great prize in the Republican primary. At times the race has seemed less an election than an audition. The various candidates, including Mr. Vance, traveled to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for fund-raisers and consultations and solicited the help of Trump allies and family members. (Donald Trump Jr. was an early Vance backer.)Each of the Republican candidates in the primary has built his or her campaign around an implicit hypothesis about how to appeal to Mr. Trump, and thus about what Trumpism is in the first place. Jane Timken, former chair of the state Republican Party, tried to win over Mr. Trump by hard work and loyalty. In 2017, she led the Trumpian project of breaking then-Gov. John Kasich’s grip on the state Republican Party.The former state treasurer, Mr. Mandel, appears to have been guided by the idea that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Having made his name promoting transparency in state accounts and other old-style mainstream Republican priorities, he now torques ordinary conservative dispositions into categorical imperatives. (“I think illegal immigrants should be deported, period,” he said at a debate in March, specifying that he meant “every single illegal.”)Rallygoers joined in the pledge of allegiance.J.D. Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio.Mr. Vance’s ultimately successful route to Mr. Trump’s favor was a bit subtler. To him the core of the Trumpian project isn’t intraparty power struggles or demagogy; it’s reconnecting politics to ordinary people. Mr. Vance tries to do this in a lot of different ways. For one thing, he calls for breaking up the nation’s cozy political system. After laying out a list of Mr. Trump’s triumphs to the MAGA crowd last weekend, Mr. Vance insisted, “The thing that Trump revealed, more than any policy achievement, is that we are living in an incredibly corrupt country.”What does it mean, Mr. Vance likes to ask listeners, that six of the highest-income ZIP codes in the United States are in metropolitan Washington? How do legislators get so rich on the relatively modest salaries they make?Mr. Vance also grasps, as Mr. Trump does, the deep discontent with political correctness, and the hunger for someone unafraid to stand up to it. If there was a moment in Mr. Vance’s campaign where his fortunes seemed to turn it was his release of a TV ad that began: “Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans? The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump’s wall.”The ad took voters by the collar. The sense among Ohioans at town halls that they are being cast as “bad people” for holding contestable but reasonable political views is palpable. They have reason to think their lives and careers can be damaged by the merest imputation of racism. A person like Mr. Vance who is willing to crack a joke about the term “racist” is someone fearless enough to follow into battle.From Mr. Trump’s perspective, it cannot have harmed Mr. Vance that he was willing to burn his boats this way. Donald Trump Jr., traveling with Mr. Vance in the week his father endorsed him, drew a contrast between Mr. Vance and other Republicans who “crumble the moment the media falsely accuses them of being ‘racist.’”Donald Trump Jr., here in Ohio with J.D. Vance, was an early backer.The barrage of televised attacks on Mr. Vance for his previous anti-Trump remarks may even have provided him with a Trumpian credential, as one who can handle nonstop negative publicity. This is not to say that Mr. Vance lacks his own formidable supporters: Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter in 2016 and a Vance friend, has reportedly made $13.5 million in campaign contributions to Protect Ohio Values, a Super PAC backing Mr. Vance.The ads that were meant to deny Mr. Vance the Trump endorsement set up an institutional confrontation that may also have worked in his favor. The Club for Growth, the Washington-based anti-tax group backing Mr. Mandel, was responsible for the ads exposing Mr. Vance’s anti-Trump remarks in 2016. But back then the Club itself was among the most Trump-hostile of Republican groups.It continues to pursue a largely supply-side, limited-government, free-trade agenda, at a time when the Trumpified Ohio G.O.P. has grown so suspicious of corporate progressivism (or, if you will, “woke capital”) that it distrusts even the Chamber of Commerce. Mr. Vance’s aides took to calling Mr. Mandel’s backers “The Club for Chinese Growth.”Then one day about two weeks ago, Mr. Vance was having a milkshake with his son when his phone rang and a voice on the other end said, “Hey, this is Donald Trump.”Mr. Vance himself has a theory about why he got the Trump endorsement and his rivals did not. It is that he treated Mr. Trump not just as a person to be flattered or parodied but also as the source of an actual political program to be carried out.“A mistake that a lot of the other guys made is that they think that ‘America First’ is a slogan or a talking point,” he told the Dayton reporter Chelsea Sick recently. “But there’s actually a substantive agenda behind it.”Whether globalization has been good or bad is not a complicated question for most Ohioans. That agenda involves trade policy, drug policy, securing the Mexican border and steering clear of unnecessary foreign wars. Some of the other candidates were unaware of how seriously Mr. Trump takes those things.“He’s a smart guy,” Mr. Vance continued. “So, unfortunately, you can’t just say nice things about Donald Trump in public. You actually have to align yourself with an agenda.”The heart of that agenda is resistance to globalization. If you wanted a one-word answer to why Mr. Trump has so rocked Ohio politics it would be: Nafta. The North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993 remains a symbol of the institutional adjustments that, over the course of a generation, turned the United States from a manufacturing economy into a service economy.Whether free trade and globalization have been good or bad for the United States is a complicated, multivariate calculation. But it is not complicated for most Ohioans. The state’s manufacturing power was once so prodigious that you almost suspect you’re reading typos when you see it quantified: Did G.M. really more than 16 million Chevy Impalas and Pontiac Firebirds and other models at its Lordstown plant in the Mahoning Valley between 1966 and 2019, when the plant ceased production? Did the Lorain works, an hour and a half away, really produce 15 million Ford Fairlanes, Mercury Cougars and so on, between the Eisenhower administration and 2005?Simply scuppering the infrastructure that made such achievements possible — along with the decent-paying jobs that knit together the whole culture of the state — looks profligate to Ohio eyes. Each of these plants also had a constellation of businesses around it, some small but others vast. Armco, where J.D. Vance’s grandfather worked, rolled steel for automobiles.This is by now an old story, but in Ohio the arrival of Donald Trump has made it a thoroughly different story. For three decades after Nafta passed, no major-party presidential nominee dared raise his voice against it — until Mr. Trump, who had always railed at Nafta, came along.As long as the state’s main grievance was closed to debate, the essential conservatism of the state’s electorate was hidden under a blanket of apathy and cynicism. For a while, Democrats alone voiced misgivings about globalization — Representative Marcy Kaptur in her lakefront district; Senator Sherrod Brown; and Representative Tim Ryan, the likely Democratic candidate for the seat Mr. Vance is contesting. That made conservative Ohio look like more of a swing state than it actually is.Whether Mr. Trump effectively stopped anything related to globalization can be debated. But his arrival on the scene was, for Ohioans, an electroshock, a vindication, a license for rebellion.MiddletownMarionInterstate 71, outside ColumbusSheffieldMr. Vance can be expected to have a feel for this. As he often says on the campaign trail, the decline of Middletown coincides with his lifetime. At a campaign event in Beavercreek, near Dayton, Kim Guy, a retired nurse, stopped at the front door before leaving and patiently explained why she was supporting Mr. Vance. She didn’t mention this or that policy or whether his change of heart was credible. “He lived it,” is the main thing she said. “He had to get down to ramen noodles the last week of the month. The rice with warm milk. He lived it.”A Vance supporter at the recent Trump rally.A home near the steel mill in Middletown.Before Mr. Trump’s arrival on the scene, Mr. Vance’s hillbillies fit poorly into the prevailing political framework for helping the downtrodden. Perhaps those people could be seen as another of the inexplicably overlooked minorities who, in the half-century since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, have from time to time come to the country’s attention — a kind of mission land to which the newest gospel of compassion, progress and rights hadn’t yet spread.But that perspective was always distant from the way Mr. Vance saw the world. “A compassion that assumes a person is disadvantaged to the point of hopelessness is like sympathy for a zoo animal,” he wrote in the Catholic journal The Lamp in 2020, “and I had no use for it.”Events since 2016 have presented Americans with another option — a Republican Party reoriented around the priorities of Donald Trump. Mr. Vance does not look out of place in the heart of that party. In early April he was the only candidate to win the endorsement of Ohio Right to Life, an anti-abortion activist group. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the often outlandish Republican of Georgia, endorsed him, too. Asked at a debate to disavow her, Mr. Vance replied that he would not, because he had been taught that you shouldn’t “stab your friends in the back.”That kind of talk is all over “Hillbilly Elegy.” It is practically his Mamaw’s philosophy of life.At his appearance in Beavercreek, Mr. Vance spoke about his mother, clean for seven years, and how the fentanyl on today’s streets might have killed her had she still been using. Eventually he would get around to denouncing the “nonstop violence, sex-trafficking and drugs” at the Mexican border and calling for the building of Mr. Trump’s wall, but for a moment his conversation took on a softer note.“I love this country,” he said. “I love that it’s not just a country for everybody who does everything right, but it’s also an America for the giving of second chances. It’s for people who keep getting back on the horse.”No state has been more transformed by Donald Trump than Ohio has.It can be difficult, even disorienting, to think of Donald Trump as having provided certain Americans with recognition, a second chance, a possibility of renewal. But he has. A politics that was unavailable has been made available. Under such circumstances accusing Mr. Vance of not backing Trumpism during the Obama administration is like accusing someone of not backing the New Deal during the Hoover administration or not backing gay marriage during the Reagan administration.Mr. Vance’s liberal admirers and conservative opponents are not wrong to feel that something has changed since his book came out in 2016. But it isn’t Mr. Vance. It’s the country.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More