By Dan McLaughlin
Wednesday, May 04, 2022
J. D. Vance’s victory in Tuesday’s Ohio Senate primary is
being greeted ecstatically by the sorts of people who are heavily invested in
retailing narratives about the Republican Party’s being entirely dominated by
its fringiest factions. There are indeed reasons for conservatives and
Republicans to be dismayed by Vance’s nomination, but its broader significance
should not be overstated.
On the downside, there is a risk that Vance will blow a
Senate race to Tim Ryan that ought to be a layup for Republicans, given the
national environment in 2022 and the rightward turn of Ohio. That is possible,
but not all that likely at the moment, and runner-up Josh Mandel presented
similar risks. More concerning is the likelihood that the election of Vance
would saddle the party, for at least the next six years, not only with a
senator who has a penchant for headache-inducing headline-grabbing, but also
with one who is likely to be an unreliable ally to any Republican president and
an opponent of much of any conservative agenda, particularly on economic and
foreign policy and the size of government. Vance’s embrace of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz on the
campaign trail, and Vance’s defense of Greene even after Greene’s appearance
at a white-nationalist event run by a Holocaust denier — Greene “did
nothing wrong,” Vance insists — sends a distinct signal about what kind of
senator he wants to be and what sorts of voices he wants to elevate within the
party. At the same time, he also represents the big-government squishiness of
John Kasich. Throw in his erratic and often isolationist-tinged foreign-policy views,
and Vance looks more like a 1930s New Deal prairie populist than a modern
Republican. But then, after the many zigs and zags of Vance over the past
several years, one can never really be sure what he actually believes today or
will say tomorrow.
But before blaming Republican voters for picking Vance,
it is important to consider two things. One, the very same voters who gave 32.2
percent of the vote to Vance also gave 48.1 percent of the vote to incumbent
governor Mike DeWine over former congressman Jim Renacci and farmer Joe
Blystone. DeWine positively embodies the Ohio Republican establishment: He has
been in public office since the Carter administration, has won six statewide
elections, and has held just about every office available to him. He’s staid,
bland, and deeply Midwestern. Populist anger at DeWine’s sometimes heavy-handed
Covid policies was enough to fuel Renacci and Blystone to each clear 20 percent
of the vote running as Trumpier alternatives to the incumbent, but it wasn’t
enough to stop DeWine from running almost 175,000 votes ahead of Vance.
Whatever Vance represents in the party, at least in Ohio, DeWine represents
something larger.
Second, Vance won for a number of reasons, but most of
all because his opponents were weak, flawed candidates who couldn’t close the
deal with Ohio voters. Mandel, who started off as the presumptive front-runner
due to his name recognition from prior statewide campaigns, was just as
clownish as Vance and even more inauthentic. Mike Gibbons, a gruff self-funding
businessman, enjoyed a big surge to take a momentary lead in the polls but
collapsed severely down the stretch after a debate blowup with Mandel that hurt
both candidates; Gibbons finished at 11.7 percent of the vote. State party
chairwoman Jane Timken, running as the longest-standing Trump loyalist while
attracting the endorsement of the sober, serious incumbent Rob Portman
and overplaying the gender card, never caught on and ended at 5.9 percent.
Matt Dolan made a late charge and wound up a hair behind Mandel (23.9
percent to 23.3 percent) by casting himself as the un-Trumpy candidate, but his
campaign was probably doomed from the outset by his family association with
the Cleveland Indians name change, a visible symbol of surrender to woke
cancelers.
The volatility in the polls in a five-way race was
symptomatic of a campaign in which voters kept trying on different candidates
and found all of them wanting. That created the ideal conditions for a big,
late endorsement to make the difference, and while Donald Trump has been
profligate with endorsements this cycle, some of them very poorly timed,
he played his cards perfectly in throwing his weight behind Vance
when the momentum was turning his way and a Trump seal of approval could give
undecided Ohio Republicans a basis for making a choice of lesser evils. Even
then, more than two-thirds of them preferred one of the other options than
Vance. That suggests that reports that Ohio voters have J. D. Vance fever are
greatly exaggerated.
No comments:
Post a Comment