BY NICK EVANS
Monday morning in Middletown thousands of people lined up outside the high school to hear newly-minted Republican Vice-Presidential nominee J.D. Vance speak. Long lines of cars snarled the intersections and quickly filled lots at the school and overflow spaces at a Miami University satellite campus across the street.
The auditorium could only fit about 900.
“We have hundreds of people outside who couldn’t get in,” Vance said as he took the stage, “and I’m so grateful Middletown for welcoming me.”
The event was a homecoming for Vance who grew up in town and graduated from the school in 2003. His portrayal of the city is at the heart of his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy and Vance’s friends and family accounted for a big share of the audience. He joked if you counted fifth cousins half the crowd was family.
Unsurprisingly the state Republican party was well-represented, too. Ohio Republican Party chairman Alex Triantafilou, U.S. Rep. Warren Davidson, Attorney General Dave Yost and at least half a dozen state lawmakers from the area showed up to hear Vance.
Before he took the stage, Triantafilou praised Vance’s ability to connect with voters and re-center campaign issues.
“The Democrats have been attacking our messenger for a long time on things like threat to democracy and things about his personal life and personality,” he said. “We should be talking about issues that the middle class cares about. I think nobody can talk about trying to climb into the middle class better than J.D. Vance.”
In his remarks, Vance offered a Trump-era, kitchen table issues pitch: look inward for workers, energy and manufacturing, and build a wall both physical and economic to protect those inside. But he also sought to draw a sharp contrast between the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns, arguing President Biden’s decision to drop out has cheated Democratic primary voters.
“You got to persuade voters, you got to win their votes,” Vance argued. “You don’t decide who the President is in smoke filled rooms with billionaires and senior elected officials.”
A dark opening act
Remarks kicked off ominously with Sen. George Lang, R-West Chester. Echoing former President Donald Trump in the moments immediately following an assassination attempt, Lang chanted “fight, fight, fight.”
The crowd roared back in approval.
As he went on, Lang called the Trump Vance ticket “the last chance to save our country politically.”
“I’m afraid (if) we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country,” Lang said. After that set off a flood of national news stories, Lang called his remarks divisive and said that he regrets them.
The remainder of the opening speakers presented a notably less dire outlook. Rep. Davidson praised Vance’s stances on foreign policy and argued they’ll be a boon to the Trump ticket.
“We don’t have to get into every war we’re invited to and we certainly don’t have to fund the ones that we don’t get into,” Davidson said.
Yost brought up the train derailment in East Palestine and criticized President Biden for taking so long to visit in person. “It did happen after 8:00 pm,” he quipped, before praising Vance for showing up repeatedly. Republican U.S. Senate nominee Bernie Moreno urged the crowd to help the campaign “because all of us united is what’s going to take to save this country.”
Striking a different tone than past GOP campaigns, Moreno encouraged them to vote early or absentee. In the bleachers behind the speakers, supporters held signs that said, “vote early” and “swamp the vote.”
Vance’s remarks
By comparison, Vance’s remarks were warm and full of hometown details. He joked about a former math teacher, and making the secret service take him by a local donut shop after his speech. Members of the crowd repeatedly interrupted him with affectionate shouts.
Angela Phillips who leads a local metal tubing company has seen the full stretch of Vance’s political career — when he announced his candidacy for U.S. Senate in 2021 he did so at her plant. She spoke glowingly about his ability to reach people from a broad array of backgrounds.
“I really support him because he understands the challenges for manufacturing, and what we are up against,” she said. “These kinds of jobs that are in small towns all across America, and why making things here so critical for the economy and critical for people’s future.”
Vance offered a version of his RNC speech — praising Trump protectionist opposition to trade deals going back to the early 1990’s, in contrast with President Biden’s support for trade liberalization.
“The problem is when our leadership makes all these dumb decisions, we know exactly who suffers the consequences,” Vance argued. “It’s the people right here in this room and the communities that we live in.”
Drawing another link to the community and his experience, Vance committed to supporting kinship care. He said there are a lot of grandparents raising kids they didn’t expect to be raising, and “I will fight for you because if it wasn’t for a grandma like that, I would not be standing here today getting to run as your next vice president nominee.”
But Vance offered red meat as well. He railed that schools should offer a “good education and not an indoctrination,” and argued for voter I.D. Notably, Ohio already has one of the strictest photo voter I.D. laws in the country. Continuing on trade, Vance complained the vast majority of ibuprofen and antibiotics are produced in China. “
“I don’t know if you were alive the past five years, but do you remember, maybe why we shouldn’t trust the Chinese attitude towards public health?” Vance said. “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t trust a damn plastic toy coming from China, I sure as hell don’t trust the drugs.”
Vance contends the barrier to returning that production to U.S. is not the cost of labor, which is dramatically lower in China, but the cost of energy and “we’re sitting on the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.” While that case may be economically dubious, it’s tailor made for voters in Pennsylvania — a crucial swing state and the country’s second largest natural gas producer.
Campaign barbs
In addition to making the case for a second Trump administration, Vance took shots at the Democratic ticket as well. On social media recently he’s argued if Biden is unfit to run, he’s unfit to serve and should resign immediately. In Middletown, however, he charged that Vice President Kamala Harris, who Biden has endorsed for the Democratic nomination, helped to perpetuate a cover-up of the president’s mental capacity.
“Every single person who saw Joe Biden knew that he wasn’t capable of doing the job and for three years they said nothing until he became political dead weight,” Vance argued.
But despite calling for Biden’s ouster, Vance and other Republican leaders now lament the supposed injustice of disenfranchising Democratic primary voters. U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson has gone so far as to float legal challenges to keep Biden on the ballot.
“So, my message to Democrats who are disgusted by this process, disgusted by how anti-democratic it is,” Vance told the crowd, “You are welcome in the Republican Party, where we think we should persuade voters and not lie to voters.”
In a statement, Ohio Democratic Party spokeswoman Katie Seewer dismissed Vance, arguing “Ohioans in Appalachia and around the state are still waiting for the help he promised the last time he was on the campaign trail.”
And while Vance was talking to a hometown crowd, Vice President Harris was addressing campaign staff in Wilmington, Delaware. As that team re-tools to advance her candidacy, Harris argued her experience as a prosecutor equips her for the race.
“I took on perpetrators of all kinds — predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, and cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said. “So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
