Okay, so J.D. Vance won the Republican nomination for a Senate seat in Ohio (in a crowded five-candidate field by seven points). Some political pundits are crowing that this is a sign of Donald Trump’s continuing hold over the Republican party. Maybe, or maybe not. One can’t discount the fact that J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist and newcomer to politics, had name recognition, with or without Trump. After all, he was the author of the bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which came out at precisely the right time (fall of 2016) to purportedly explain why Trump had such a strong showing in Appalachia among working class voters whose self interests don’t exactly align with his largely inherited wealth and New York society roots. When Vance’s memoir was first published, I read it, largely because I was working on a memoir that told almost the opposite story: of a middle-class child growing in an unusually progressive intentional community that taught me how to challenge the status quo. (That memoir became Brassy Broad: How one journalist helped pave the way to #MeToo, which was released last fall with admittedly a lot less fanfare than Hillbilly Elegy).
Less you think this is sour grapes, allow me to add that I was also interested in Vance’s memoir because I had moved to Appalachia (northern West Virginia) 10 years ago to teach journalism at West Virginia University and since then, have striven mightily to understand my new environment. While Morgantown (where WVU’s main campus is and many faculty and students live) exists in a slightly more progressive bubble than the rest of the state, I live cheek to jowl with former coal miners and others who embrace Trump and continue to do so in the face of incontrovertible evidence that he tried to overturn a democratic election and instigate a coup. So reading Hillbilly Elegy gave me a little perspective on the mixture of stubborn self-reliance and xenophobia that, when mixed with misinformation on social media, gives rise to voters who embrace Trump’s bombastic assaults on the truth. Vance’s book wasn’t particularly well-written but it was compelling in its own way, and it sold almost 700,000 copies before being made into a movie starring Glen Close and Amy Adams.
So while Trump’s endorsement of J.D. Vance (after the author had walked back earlier anti-Trump tweets) certainly helped propel the Ohio native to the finish line, there were other factors involved in his win: the backing of billionaire Peter Thiel, a conservative venture capitalist and founder of Paypal who gave $10 million to a group backing Vance. And, as I mentioned before, there’s that name recognition. As some pundits argue, Vance’s win in the Ohio Republican primary doesn’t mean that Trump’s power is unassailable. In the Washington Post today, columnist James Hohmann notes that there are signs of a revolt against Trump among some Ohio Republicans. As Hohmann notes, Ohio’s Republican governor Dave DeWine won his primary yesterday by 19 points despite Trump publicly suggested that someone should take him on. (Someone did and lost handily).
To my mind, the real test of Trump’s power will be the Georgia Republican primary May 24, when Governor Brian Kemp, whom Trump hates because he refused to support the former President’s efforts to overturn legitimate Presidential results in Georgia in 2020, goes up against David Perdue, a Trump-endorsed candidate. And of course, J.D. Vance still has to face Tim Ryan, the successful Democratic candidate and a 10-term Democratic Congressman, in the general election come fall. And that, of course, is when we will see how viable Trump’s status as power broker truly is.
This blog is also posted on medium.com.
