Thursday, May 5, 2022

Less Than Meets the Eye in J. D. Vance’s Primary Victory

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.

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