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    Trump Names David Sacks to Oversee Crypto and A.I.

    President-elect Donald J. Trump has named one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent conservative investors, donors and media personalities to help oversee American tech policy.David Sacks, a venture capitalist and an early executive at PayPal who launched a hit podcast, will be the “White House A.I. and Crypto Czar,” the president-elect announced in a social media post on Thursday. Mr. Sacks is a close friend of Elon Musk, and Mr. Sacks has been among the people over the last year or so encouraging Mr. Musk to delve deeper into Republican politics.The position will be new, and further cements the expectation that the Trump White House intends to take a lighter hand with the regulation of technology and in particular cryptocurrencies, which have surged in value since Mr. Trump won the election and in which Mr. Trump personally has a business interest. Mr. Sacks, who leads a venture capital firm called Craft Ventures, has in general called for a more permissive policy on both cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence.Mr. Sacks won a battle within the Trump transition effort. Some people were pitching Mr. Trump’s team on separate positions where different people would oversee artificial intelligence and crypto, according to a person close to the process. But Mr. Sacks was chosen to oversee them all together in a joint appointment.“David will guide policy for the Administration in Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency, two areas critical to the future of American competitiveness,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday evening. “David will focus on making America the clear global leader in both areas.”It is not clear if his role will be full time; Mr. Sacks has previously told friends that he did not want a formal role because it would require him to leave his position overseeing his venture capital fund, The New York Times has previously reported. Mr. Sacks announced a new start-up funding round led by his firm just this week.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    JD Vance Has Right-Wing Friends in High Places

    The single most troubling thing about Senator JD Vance — his bizarre understanding of the work of J.R.R. Tolkien notwithstanding — is his close relationship with some of the most extreme elements of the American right.When asked to explain his worldview, Vance has cited his former boss, Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who has written passionately against democracy (“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”), and Curtis Yarvin, a software developer turned blogger and provocateur who believes the United States should transition to monarchy (“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia”). Yarvin has also written favorably of human bondage (slavery, he once wrote, “is a natural human relationship”) and wondered aloud if apartheid wasn’t better for Black South Africans.While Vance’s admirers see him as a uniquely intellectual presence in American politics — a thinker as much as a politician — his right-wing, authoritarian views are largely derivative of the views and preoccupations of Thiel, Yarvin and their community of “postliberal” ideologues and reactionary venture capitalists. Take Vance’s view that the United States is in a period of Romanesque decline. “We are in a late republican period,” Vance said on a podcast in 2021. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”Compare this to Thiel’s view that “liberalism” and “democracy” are “exhausted,” and that to restore the nation “we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window.” Is this a call for new tax cuts, or does it represent a fundamental hostility toward popular constitutional government in the United States?In addition to relationships with Thiel and Yarvin, Vance is also in close contact with the bottom feeders on the far right. For nearly two years, according to The Washington Post, Vance was in regular conversation by text message with Chuck Johnson, a notorious Holocaust denier who has spent the better part of a decade promoting right-wing conspiracy theories.And as my colleague Michelle Goldberg wrote this week, Vance is close enough to Jack Posobiec — an alt-right lunatic who pushed the vile and absurd Pizzagate conspiracy theory and collaborated with online neo-Nazis to spread antisemitic hate — to blurb his latest book, a polemic devoted to the idea that liberals and leftists are Untermenschen who must be stopped lest they destroy civilization. “As they are opposed to humanity itself,” Posobiec and his co-author, Joshua Lisec, write, “they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Other Tech Billionaires Brawl Over Politics

    Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and other tech billionaires, many of whom are part of the “PayPal Mafia,” are openly brawling with one another over politics as tensions rise.Less than an hour after a gunman in Butler, Pa., tried to assassinate Donald J. Trump this month, David Sacks, a venture capitalist based in San Francisco, directed his anger about the incident toward a former colleague.“The Left normalized this,” Mr. Sacks wrote on X, linking to a post about Reid Hoffman, a technology investor and major Democratic donor. Mr. Sacks implied that Mr. Hoffman, a critic of Mr. Trump who had funded a lawsuit accusing the former president of rape and defamation, had helped cause the shooting.Elon Musk, who leads SpaceX and Tesla and previously worked with Mr. Sacks and Mr. Hoffman, then weighed in on X, name-checking Mr. Hoffman and saying people like him “got their dearest wish.”In Silicon Valley, the spectacle of tech billionaire attacking tech billionaire has suddenly exploded, as pro-Trump executives and their Democratic counterparts have openly turned on each other. The brawling has spilled into public view online, at conferences and on podcasts, as debates about the country’s future have turned into personal broadsides.The animus has pit those who once worked side by side and attended each other’s weddings against one another, fraying friendships and alliances that could shift Silicon Valley’s power centers. The fighting has been particularly acute among the “PayPal Mafia,” a wealthy group of tech executives — including Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Musk, Mr. Sacks and the investor Peter Thiel — who worked together at the online payments company in the 1990s and later founded their own companies or turned into high-profile investors.Other tech leaders have also been pulled into the political spats, including Vinod Khosla, a prominent investor, and Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of the Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ¿Quién es J. D. Vance, el candidato republicano a la vicepresidencia?

    En los últimos ocho años, Vance pasó de ser un autor exitoso y un crítico declarado de Trump a convertirse en uno de los defensores más fervientes del exmandatario.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]J. D. Vance, el senador republicano por Ohio que recientemente fue escogido como el compañero de fórmula del expresidente Donald Trump, ha tenido una trayectoria rápida en los últimos ocho años pasando de ser un autor exitoso y un crítico declarado de Trump a convertirse en uno de los defensores más fervientes del exmandatario y, ahora, su segundo al mando.Antes de dedicarse a la política, Vance, de 39 años, era conocido como el autor del libro Hillbilly Elegy (Hillbilly, una elegía rural: Memorias de una familia y una cultura en crisis), un éxito de ventas que relataba su crianza en el seno de una familia pobre y que, a su vez, servía como una especie de análisis sociológico de la clase trabajadora blanca en Estados Unidos. Publicado en el verano previo a la elección de Trump en 2016, y tras su victoria, muchos lectores vieron el libro como un tipo de guía para comprender el apoyo que las comunidades blancas de clase trabajadora le dieron al expresidente.Vance denunció al exmandatario sin piedad durante su campaña de 2016. Pero, para 2022, ya lo había aceptado y gracias a su apoyo ganó unas elecciones primarias republicanas muy concurridas y se convirtió en una voz a favor de Trump en el Congreso.A continuación, presentamos más detalles sobre los antecedentes y las posturas de Vance.Antecedentes personales: Nació en Middletown, Ohio, y pasó parte de su infancia en Jackson, Kentucky, donde fue criado por sus abuelos maternos porque su madre luchaba contra la drogadicción. Luego regresó a Middletown y, cuando terminó el bachillerato, se unió a la infantería de marina. Fue destinado a Irak, donde se dedicó a labores de asuntos públicos. Más tarde, estudió en la Universidad Estatal de Ohio y en la Escuela de Derecho de la Universidad de Yale.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Vivek Ramaswamy Is a LinkedIn Post Come to Life

    Last year, for a column I was writing about the power that large asset managers like BlackRock and Vanguard exert over the global economy, I called up Vivek Ramaswamy. He was delighted to hear from me.I don’t mean this as self-aggrandizement. Ramaswamy was set to start Strive, an asset management company he hoped would take on the BlackRocks and Vanguards of the world, and was about to publish his second book, so he had good reason to court media attention. Still, I found his enthusiasm noteworthy; as a journalist who covers Silicon Valley, I’m used to chatting up smooth-operator entrepreneurs eager for coverage, but Ramaswamy’s media hustle was of a different order.He told me I could call him anytime I’d like to bounce ideas off a “thought partner.” He sent me a PDF of his upcoming book — “No one has seen an advance copy yet” — and followed up to ask, seemingly earnestly, for my thoughts on his thesis. And when I joked, in my piece, that the title of his first book, “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” sounded “as if it had been formulated in a lab at Fox News to maximally tickle the base and trigger the libs,” he texted me with an explanation that he suggested I append to the published column:My publisher (Hachette) and I selected the book title long before the word “woke” had become weaponized in the culture wars. Today, I mostly don’t even use that word anymore; it’s not part of my vernacular today. It was suggested to me as a title by a self-identified “far-left” friend in early 2020. The word took on a different valence between then and late 2021 when my book was published. I just wanted you to know that, since I saw you mused about the etymology of the title in your piece. It certainly wasn’t cooked up in a Fox News lab, and in all honesty the goal wasn’t to trigger anyone. If anything, my goal with the book was to provide a unifying voice across culturally fraught questions, and I think most left-wing readers of the book would agree that it was at least clear I tried to do that.Maybe that was all really the case. But I got the impression that he was also trying — a little too hard — to paint himself in a light that he thought might appeal to a lefty Times columnist.In the wake of his breakout performance at last month’s Republican primary debate, much has been made of Ramaswamy’s irrepressible annoyingness — is it a bug that could prevent him from winning the G.O.P. presidential nomination, or is it the feature that could help him secure it? But what I found striking about Ramaswamy, both in our conversations and on the debate stage, was not that he’s especially irritating (how many people who run for president aren’t?) but that he represents a distinct, very familiar flavor of irritation: He’s the epitome of millennial hustle culture, less a Tracy Flick know-it-all than a viral LinkedIn post come to life. The guy who’s always mining and nurturing new connections, always leveraging those connections into the next new thing, always selling and always, always closing.Seen this way, Ramaswamy’s otherwise quixotic-seeming presidential run makes perfect sense. Whether or not it wins him elected office, running for the White House is the ultimate rise and grind, and it probably offers far more upside than down. Incessant, glad-handed striving has already made Ramaswamy a wealthy man. According to a report in Politico this year, his campaign said he’s ready to put more than $100 million into his presidential bid, but because this latest side hustle feeds so neatly into his other projects, it’s hardly clear that the run will be so costly. Measured in name recognition, the expansion of his network or future moneymaking opportunities, running for president could well add to his riches.Take Strive, the management company he co-founded. In “Woke, Inc.,” Ramaswamy lamented what he saw as the pollution of capitalist principles with social justice activism. Rather than focus on the bottom line, he argued, the leaders of America’s largest corporations had allowed their employees and other elites to goad them into adopting what he said are costly political stances on race, gender, climate and other charged issues.This isn’t exactly a groundbreaking position on the right — combating corporate wokeness is basically Ron DeSantis’s whole thing. But whereas DeSantis’s fixation on all things woke is primarily a vehicle for his political ascent, Ramaswamy saw in wokeness a larger opportunity. He would write a book and guest essays assailing corporate E.S.G. (environmental, social and governance) practices, and he was also considering a political run, but to really “move the needle,” he told me, would also require taking on “the asset management ideological cartel.” And backed with a reported $20 million from billionaire investors and tech entrepreneurs he’d courted, among them Bill Ackman and Peter Thiel, he started Strive.That’s not a lot of money with which to take on the giants of asset management — BlackRock and Vanguard each manage trillions in assets — but Ramaswamy’s hustle was unceasing. Three months after it opened for business, Strive announced that it had already attracted $500 million in investments for its anti-woke E.T.F.s, or exchange-traded funds. In June it reported $750 million in assets under management, and this week it reported crossing the $1 billion mark. That’s minuscule compared with the giants, but its growth is significant; in July, Semafor’s Liz Hoffman noted that it took J.P. Morgan two years to reach $1 billion in assets after it started offering E.T.F.s in 2014.“It is a rare feat for any indie issuer to hit $1 billion in first year,” Eric Balchunas, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, told Bloomberg News of Strive’s accomplishment. “Ramaswamy’s wealthy backers helped a lot, and running for president probably can’t hurt, either.” You think?Ramaswamy no longer works at Strive. Via email, the company told me that he was the executive chairman of the board and ran day-to-day operations until February, when he stepped down to run for president.But he still has a huge interest in its success. In an S.E.C. filing last month, Ramaswamy is identified as the company’s majority shareholder. In a financial disclosure form filed in June, Ramaswamy valued his stake in Strive at over $50 million — a remarkable amount for a company that’s just about a year old, where he worked for just months. His disclosure listed his stake in Roivant Sciences, a biotech company he was previously the chief executive of, at over $50 million as well. (Forbes recently calculated Ramaswamy’s net worth at around $950 million.)Looking back on my exchange with Ramaswamy, I find it interesting how hard he pushed back on his association with the word “woke”; he hasn’t shied away from it on the campaign trail. In February, when he announced his candidacy in The Wall Street Journal, he wrote that “America is in the midst of a national identity crisis” and that “the Republican Party’s top priority should be to fill this void with an inspiring national identity that dilutes the woke agenda to irrelevance.”But his current comfort with “woke” works for winning over a G.O.P. primary audience. When he needs to cultivate a broader base, whether in the general election or in hopes of expanding his Rolodex for whatever side hustle comes next, I’m sure he won’t hesitate to reach out and tell me just what he thinks I want to hear.Office Hours With Farhad ManjooFarhad wants to chat with readers on the phone. If you’re interested in talking to a New York Times columnist about anything that’s on your mind, please fill out this form. Farhad will select a few readers to call.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

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    The Republican Party Made Trump the Focus of the Midterms

    If Republicans have many things going for them in next week’s elections — an economy that’s like a millstone around Democrats’ necks, fear in the electorate about crime and a chaotic immigration system, President Biden’s low approval ratings — they are also taking what appear to be some enormous risks: having candidates on the ballot who many observers see as too inexperienced, extreme or scandal-burdened to win in November.But they forget that Republicans already took an enormous risk, in 2016, by nominating Donald Trump for president. And not only did they avoid ballot-box suicide to win the election, but it was the beginning of a renaissance for the Republican Party. Mr. Trump’s approach, gleeful culture war combativeness atop core conservative principles, delivered both short-term policy wins and long-sought victories for his party’s base, like tax cuts, a long procession of conservative federal judges, a Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, the American Embassy moved to Jerusalem. He also pleased the Republican right by giving the party a new focus on immigration and shifting its foreign policy away from wars and nation-building in the Middle East.The Republican Party’s strategy in 2022 has been to double down on the Trump approach. Its candidates for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania and Georgia, Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz, are celebrities without political experience, as is Kari Lake, a former Phoenix area news anchor who is now the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona.Blake Masters, running for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, has never held office and is perhaps best known for his association with Peter Thiel, a billionaire co-founder of PayPal, for whom Mr. Masters once worked and with whom he co-authored the 2014 book “Zero to One.” Also close to Mr. Thiel, and likewise a first-time aspirant to office, is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, J.D. Vance, famed for his own best-selling book, the 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”Mitch McConnell may question “candidate quality,” but the Republican Party’s embrace of apparently high-risk candidates is a sign of confidence, not weakness. The party’s voters feel strongly enough about the populist, pro-Trump positioning that they have supported them over more experienced and less controversial figures.This reinvention is presenting midterm voters with something that looks fresh and new, at a time when the old party identities, and old norms and institutions, seem feeble and impotent.Joe Biden is a living symbol of that. In 2008, the Democrats branded themselves as the party of hope and change. President Biden is the farthest thing from a face of change, and fear of Mr. Trump has characterized the party’s messaging far more than any sense of hope. The Democrats are defensive, and what they’re defending seems to be naturally decaying — a political consensus that has disappointed Americans, fulfilling neither the demands for justice of the passionate left nor the middle class’s expectations for economic growth and stability at home and abroad.In these crumbling conditions, risk may be more attractive than hopeless defensiveness. And the G.O.P. is exciting, for good and for ill, in a way that the Democratic Party has not been since Barack Obama’s re-election. Boldness pays dividends, especially when the fundamental conditions of a midterm election make the risks smaller than they seem.Nominees like Mr. Masters, Mr. Walker and Ms. Lake have been controversial even in some quarters of the Republican Party. They have staked out hard-right political positions and have not backed down from aligning themselves with Mr. Trump even during an election season in which the former president’s conduct during the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 is the subject of ongoing congressional hearings and his handling of classified material at his Mar-a-Lago residence under scrutiny by the Justice Department. Except for Mr. Walker, these candidates faced early competition in their primaries from experienced Republican officeholders.The party’s gambles look increasingly likely to pay off. Encouraged by recent polls, Republicans expect the right-wing populist approach of 2016 to produce midterm results like those of 1994, when the party picked up both chambers of Congress. Even so, skeptics of Trumpian reinvention of the Republican Party might wonder if its success — assuming it materializes — is not despite, rather than because of, Mr. Trump and his style of politics.Democrats contemplating a “red wave” next week might console themselves with the thought that nothing they could have done would have changed the fundamental forces giving Republicans an advantage this cycle. After all, the president’s party almost always loses seats in midterm elections.If Democrats under Bill Clinton could lose both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate in 1994, and Republicans under George W. Bush could lose both in 2006, it may seem like destiny for the Democrats to lose their razor-thin majorities in the House and Senate under President Biden this year. Democrats lost the House in Barack Obama’s first midterm elections in 2010 as well, and the Senate in his second in 2014.What’s more, some Republicans who have defied and opposed Mr. Trump, like Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, are also poised to do well on Nov. 8. The former president’s critics in the party might well believe that any version of the Republican Party could do well in this environment, and the they might do even better without the new populist right.These thoughts are a comfort to those who would like to see American politics revert to what had passed for normal in the years before 2016. But they don’t overturn the daunting reality faced by both Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans: The Republican Party has chosen to remake itself in Trump’s image, and the political gestalt he created can win. It won the White House in 2016 and it has held on to the Republican Party as an institution even after the defeats of 2018 and 2020. This year Republican congressional and gubernatorial candidates are more Trump-like than ever, from their views on immigration and foreign policy to their disdain for the Republican Party establishment of the time before Mr. Trump. Experience counts far less than before, certainly in Republican primaries, while candidates like Mr. Walker, Mr. Oz, and Ms. Lake suggest that celebrity appeal will play a growing part in Republican politics, and thus the country’s, in the future.Mr. Vance, 38, and Mr. Masters, 36, for their part show that the reinvented Republican Party is attracting highly talented and intelligent young candidates who are likely to further accelerate the party’s ideological transformation. For its supporters, and perhaps for a wider curious public, the Republican Party has become exciting and evolutionary. While Democrats have taken some risks of their own this cycle, with candidates such as Pennsylvania nominee for U.S. Senate, John Fetterman, the party still seems more reactive than creative.The Republican Party has nominated and primed set to elect a wave of right-wing candidates who will shape American politics in the years ahead with or without Mr. Trump.The Republicans, in short, are taking entrepreneurial risks and have the initiative. And while the conditions of the 2022 midterms allow them to capitalize on it, the impetus itself is what matters most for our future.Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.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

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    In Ohio, G.O.P. Sees a Clean Victory as Democrats Predict an Upset

    Polls show Representative Tim Ryan competing within the margin of error against his Republican opponent, J.D. Vance, in the high-profile Ohio Senate race.CLEVELAND — When Tim Ryan speaks to Democratic crowds in the closing days of the Ohio Senate race, his biggest applause line is about the other team.A Republican official in a “deep-red county,” he recounts, his voice dropping to a stage whisper, told him, “You have no idea how many Republicans are going to quietly vote for you.”The hoots and hollers that break out represent the high hopes of a party that has lost much of its appeal to working-class voters and that sees in Mr. Ryan — a congressman from the Mahoning Valley who has an anti-China, pro-manufacturing message and whose own father is a Republican — a chance to claw back blue-collar credibility.Polls show Mr. Ryan competing within the margin of error against his Republican opponent, J.D. Vance. Mr. Ryan is polling higher than President Biden’s job approval rating in Ohio surveys, and he is outperforming the Democratic candidate for governor, Nan Whaley. That suggests a potentially sizable pool of voters who intend to split their tickets between a Republican for governor and a Democrat for Senate.“This is going to be the upset of the night,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview on his campaign bus on Thursday, as he plied the pro-Democrat shoreline of Lake Erie from Toledo to Cleveland.“There’s a lot of Republicans who would never tell a pollster that they’re voting for me,” he said. “They don’t want to put a yard sign up. They don’t want to get in a fight with the neighbor who’s got the ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ flag.”He said his internal polling showed 12 percent or more of Republicans “coming our way.”But there is also the cold reality of a midterm environment tilting against Democrats almost everywhere, with inflation the top voter concern. Polling in Ohio in recent elections has undercounted the backing for Republican candidates. And there has been a political realignment of Ohio voters in the past decade, which has largely pushed the state off the battleground map.J.D. Vance listening to local elected officials at the annual Darke County Republican Party Hog Roast.Brian Kaiser for The New York TimesWhite Ohioans without college degrees have shifted toward Republicans up and down the ballot, while suburban, college-educated voters have moved to favor Democrats, though less consistently.“Ohio is a much more Republican state than Texas is,” said Mike Hartley, a Republican strategist with 25 years of experience in Ohio. “Democrats talk about things that for a lot of Ohioans offends their core principles and sensibilities, and they run away from the pocketbook issues.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.Pennsylvania Senate Race: The debate performance by Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is still recovering from a stroke, has thrust questions of health to the center of the pivotal race and raised Democratic anxieties.G.O.P. Inflation Plans: Republicans are riding a wave of anger over inflation as they seek to recapture Congress, but few economists expect their proposals to bring down rising prices.Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Former President Donald J. Trump twice won Ohio with ease by appealing to the economic and cultural anxieties of working-class white voters. In 2020, he grew his support in the state’s industrial northeast — Mr. Ryan’s base — and became the first Republican presidential candidate in 50 years to win Mahoning County, which is home to Youngstown.Bob Paduchik, chairman of the Republican Party of Ohio, brushed off the notion of quiet Republican support for Mr. Ryan. He said county-level absentee voting data and an analysis using Republican National Committee modeling predicted a clean Vance victory.“I don’t know what he thinks he’s looking at,” he said of Mr. Ryan’s assertion of hidden support. “But I’ll take our data, which is based on the R.N.C. modeling, which has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in it.”Despite Mr. Trump’s success in Ohio, Democrats point to the example of Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat and gruff-voiced champion of organized labor who won re-election in 2018 by appealing to working-class voters who might not have liked his progressive social priorities, but believed he would fight for their jobs.Mr. Ryan touring a job training facility at McKinley United Methodist Church in Dayton, Ohio. Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMr. Ryan, casting himself partly in the Brown mold, is the grandson of a steelworker and a longtime opponent of trade deals that hurt American factories. He has said that President Biden should not seek re-election and he opposed Nancy Pelosi for House speaker. A former college quarterback, he appears in his ads throwing darts in a bar or footballs at TV sets. “You want culture wars? I’m not your guy,” he says.Mr. Ryan pitches himself to voters weary of the divisiveness and anger broiling in America. “I have this conversation with my dad all the time,” he said in the interview, adding that his father “probably” voted for Mr. Trump, twice.“People are tired of the insanity,” Mr. Ryan told a gathering of Democratic activists on the shore of Lake Erie in Sandusky on Thursday. “We’re Ohio. Ohio doesn’t do crazy.”It was a sideswipe at Mr. Vance, who has campaigned with the far-right Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, has flirted with the conspiracy theory that Democrats want to “replace” existing voters with immigrants and has defended Alex Jones as “more reputable” than an MSNBC host.On Friday, speaking to supporters at the county Republican headquarters in Canton, Mr. Vance portrayed his opponent as disingenuous in claiming to be a new-model Democrat. Mr. Vance joked that “maybe we should have invited Tim Ryan” because of the Democrat’s efforts to distance himself from his own party.“This guy is not the moderate that he pretends to be,” Mr. Vance continued. “He’s a guy who bends the knee to Nancy Pelosi and does what he’s told.”One sign that Mr. Ryan remains a long shot is the lack of TV advertising from big-spending groups tied to the Democratic Senate leadership, which have poured tens of millions of dollars into races elsewhere.Mr. Ryan has compensated by raising a staggering $48 million on his own. The money flowed from small donors around the country, many annoyed by Mr. Vance’s political evolution, from the “Hillbilly Elegy” author who denounced Mr. Trump in 2016 as “cultural heroin” to a stalwart Trump supporter. At a rally in Ohio last month, the former president joked that Mr. Vance “is kissing my ass” to win his support.Mr. Vance’s supporters in Cincinnati reacting to the news that he won the Republican primary in May.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMr. Trump is scheduled to return to the state the day before the election for a rally with Mr. Vance in Dayton. Asked at a brief news conference on Friday whether he needed a boost from the former president, Mr. Vance said: “I like the president. I thought his policies deliver prosperity for the state of Ohio, and he wants to come to Ohio, and we’d love to have him in Ohio. It’s really that simple.”Unlike Mr. Ryan, who has shunned campaigning with national Democratic figures, Mr. Vance has embraced national G.O.P. leaders, appearing in Canton with the Republican National Committee chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, and Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the Republican Senate campaign arm.Mr. Vance has largely relied on the Republican cavalry from out of state, most significantly for $28 million in TV ads from a super PAC aligned with Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader.Mr. Vance on his own has raised $12.7 million, after his campaign was supported almost exclusively by a super PAC funded by $15 million from the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who once employed Mr. Vance. After Mr. Vance won his primary, Mr. Thiel moved on to other races.On Friday, Ms. McDaniel reminded reporters that polls in Ohio historically have widely missed support for Republicans.“J.D. is actually polling higher than President Trump was heading into the election in 2020,” she said. Mr. Trump went on to win the state by eight percentage points.“What people were seeing in the polling is not new in this state,” Mr. Vance told reporters. “It always overstates things to the benefit of the Democrats.”With a little more than one week before the election on Nov. 8, Mr. Ryan has been making an appeal to unity in these fractured times.“I know you feel the same way as I do,” he told activists in an autoworkers union hall in Cleveland on Thursday night. “I don’t want any more hate. I don’t want any more anger.” He added: “I want people who care about each other. I want some forgiveness. I want some grace.” More