J.D. Vance
“I’M NOT JUST A FLIP-FLOPPER, I’M A FLIP-flop-flipper on Trump,” J.D. Vance says with a laugh, slicing into a half-stack of breakfast pancakes. The Hillbilly Elegy author and newly minted Republican Senate candidate is sitting at the counter of a Cincinnati diner on July 2, explaining why he thinks he can win.
The prior evening, Vance had launched his 2022 bid at a steel-tube factory in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, with paeans to the American Dream and blasts of populist rhetoric. “The elites plunder this country and then blame us for it in the process,” he told a crowd of several hundred.
Running for office was a predictable next step for Vance, whose hit 2016 memoir traced his rise from troubled Appalachian roots to the Marines and was cited by Hillary Clinton and feted at pointy-headed panel discussions, though some liberals criticized its up-by-the-bootstraps framing. At a time when elites struggled to comprehend Trump’s appeal, Vance’s diagnosis of rural white Americans’ disillusionment with a government and society that had left them behind seemed prescient.
