? Does J.D. Vance Love Trump? + Hit-And-Run Grief + Melt May 4th Menu
Happy Monday! If you’ve got voting on your mind, we’ve got an interesting piece on late-surging Republican U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” from The New York Times. Recent polling shows the longshot candidate Matt Dolan also gaining ground with GOP voters.
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J.D. Vance Wants To Be The Patron Saint Of Trumpism
That was the headline on the cover of The New York Times Sunday Review section, arrayed in a halo over a giant mug of J.D. Vance, who’s seeking Ohio’s Republican U.S. Senate nomination in a battle being watched nationwide. Seemingly every other campaign ad on television locally — the product of a $1 million attack effort by two Super PACs — focuses on tearing down Vance’s newfound Trumpian credentials.
Most of them zero in on Vance’s own words. In the not-too-distant past, Vance has:
- said “I’m a Never Trump guy”
- wondered whether Trump was “America’s Hitler”
- stated that “Trump is the fruit of the party’s collective neglect”
- wrote “my God what an idiot” about Trump
- contemplated voting for (gasp!) Hillary Clinton
Vance changed his tune, however, and President Trump decided none of this dissing mattered much. He endorsed Vance in mid-April.
The lengthy Times piece by Christopher Caldwell gets to the heart of Vance’s Trumpian epiphany and conversion:
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 when 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.
Polling shows Vance now holds a narrow lead among the seven GOP hopefuls, according to a story in the National Review. Another poll shows anti-Trump candidate Matt Dolan also surging. At least one poll puts the state senator from suburban Cleveland a point ahead of Vance.
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Cleveland Social
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