According to the polling averages, Republican venture capitalist J.D. Vance is currently leading his opponent, Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, by a little over two points in the Ohio Senate race. FiveThirtyEight now gives the Hillbilly Elegy author an 80 percent chance of winning the seat in Tuesday's midterm. Assuming that forecast proves accurate, it will be a major victory for a combative, authoritarian political style increasingly associated with the national conservative movement.
The signature characteristic of the natcons, as I've written elsewhere, is a desire to wield government power in "muscular" fashion against their political enemies. Vance, who spoke at the National Conservatism Conference in 2019 and 2021, epitomizes that lust for power; if anything, he has been more willing than most on the New Right to openly declare his intent to use the state in obviously extralegal ways, telling Fox News' Tucker Carlson, for example, that conservatives should employ the taxation power to "seize" the assets of "woke, leftist" nonprofits such as the Ford Foundation and universities such as Harvard.
