On my first full day following JD Vance, he sauntered past three eager reporters peppering him with questions to ask me if I wanted to grab milkshakes. It was a bizarre moment, given I was wearing sweatpants, filming him with my phone’s camera and loudly asking why he supported forced birth for women who’ve been involuntarily impregnated, as I had done for the better part of six months. Yet here he was, years before becoming the heir apparent to the MAGA empire as Donald Trump’s second vice presidential running mate, offering me a vanilla milkshake in front of several Columbus reporters, despite his staff repeatedly telling him that he should never speak to me.
Normally, a tracker like me would barely get a nod from the candidate, let alone an invitation for a milkshake from a potential US senator. Most days as a tracker are far from glamorous — you wait for hours at a right-wing barbeque only to record the same stump speech for the hundredth time, you’re followed to your car by a Republican threatening to pour hot coffee on you, or you’re recognized and dragged away by security that’s more than happy to manhandle an obnoxious 20 something. Occasionally though, you get a soundbite that can fuel an entire news cycle — like in this ad where I questioned Vance after our team unearthed footage of his remarks condemning divorce.
My daily mission during the 2022 midterm cycle was simple: Attend every Vance campaign event possible armed with nothing but an iPhone and a loud mouth, hoping to catch a slip-up for the Democrat, Tim Ryan, campaign. Yet Vance went out of his way to charm me throughout the campaign trail. At one point, he even looked directly into my camera to tell Ryan I deserved a promotion for my “tenacity.”
Spending countless hours with Vance on the campaign trail gave me an unusual perspective on the man behind the headlines. With a background remarkably similar to his, I found Vance to be surprisingly charming and empathetic — qualities that starkly contrast with the divisive figure which polling has found left a majority of voters viewing the Ohio senator as unlikable and irrelevant in the aftermath of his 2022 win. His love for stirring media controversy, combined with a chameleon-like knack for shifting his persona to suit any audience under the guise of “Midwestern charm,” revealed a strategic mind not to be underestimated. Whatever the public perception, Vance’s ambitions and adaptability suggest he is poised to remain a significant figure in American politics for years to come.
“The non-campaign of JD Vance”
The most bizarre thing about the Ohio U.S. Senate race was that, for months, it was impossible to find Vance. When I started work as a tracker, I spent weeks pulling my hair out, convinced I was terrible at my job because I couldn’t find his events. But very quickly, I realized I wasn’t alone — and Republicans were much more frustrated than I was.
Youngstown-based conservative radio host Ron Verb devoted an entire show to berating Vance for needing to “get off his ass” and “start moving.” Cincinnati-based conservative radio host Bill Cunningham lamented that Republican voters “can’t find J.D. Vance with a search warrant.” In later coverage, Cunningham dubbed it the “non-campaign of JD Vance.”
When Vance finally appeared on their shows, the hosts seemed almost heartbroken. “We just want more from you,” Verb told Vance. Cunningham couldn’t believe Vance didn’t appear at the governor’s annual ice cream social: “You missed Fran’s cherry pies, one of the highlights in Greene County!”
One Republican strategist reached his breaking point when, amid weeks of criticism for running a lackluster campaign, Vance’s only appearance was not in Ohio but at CPAC Israel, where he delivered remarks complimenting Israel for having a high birth rate. “Tim Ryan is talking about kitchen-table issues, and J.D. Vance is out there going to f**king CPAC in Israel," the strategist told the Daily Beast. "Republicans are like, ‘Are you out of your f**king mind?’ This isn’t some f**king book tour, dude,” he said.
At the time, I couldn’t wrap my head around Vance’s ghost campaign. I mean, Trump literally couldn’t remember Vance’s name at a rally. He called him “JP – JD Mandel,” confusing Vance with another Republican, Josh Mandel, who ran against Vance in the primary. Wouldn’t that light a fire under you?
With hindsight, Vance likely knew he was far enough ahead in the race that he didn’t need to risk a campaign gaffe going viral, like his attempted Diet Mountain Dew joke at an Ohio rally this cycle. That, or he hated campaigning and knew he had plenty of money from his billionaire benefactor Peter Thiel. Either way, the opposition pitches practically wrote themselves.
Enemies with Benefits: My Encounters with JD Vance
American Legion Hall #471 — Portsmouth, Ohio
By May of 2022, we had uncovered footage of JD Vance condemning divorce to a group of Catholic high school students, even in instances of “violent” marriages. With Vance still yet to do a formal interview post-primary, it was my job to ask Vance about these comments on-camera.
“What do I do if he talks to me? Do I ask him follow-ups?” I asked.
“He’d have to be insane to talk to you. The first thing you learn as a politician is to literally never speak to your tracker,” my boss said.
Right.
Cut to our interaction after Vance’s first public appearance in southern Ohio:
“JD, any comment on why women should stay in abusive marriages?”
“I didn’t say that, pal,” Vance replied, turning to walk away with his staff.
I stood there, a bit shocked that he responded, but realizing we had the first major Vance clip of our campaign.
“Good job. Keep asking him questions next time,” my boss said.
Marietta Labor Day Parade
It was several weeks before I would see my “pal” again. This time, it happened at a Labor Day parade in southeast Ohio.
Over the summer, we had uncovered evidence that Vance’s non-profit had funded a Yale psychiatrist with ties to Purdue Pharmaceuticals to conduct research in Ohio. In addition to arguing that pharmaceutical companies were not at fault for Ohioans becoming addicted to oxycontin, she also referred to Ohioans like they were subjects in a foreign country — she literally titled her Yale Psychiatry Grand Rounds "My Year Abroad: Ironton, Ohio and Lessons from the Opioid Crisis.” (She was born in New York). It was my job to ask Vance why he brought this person to Ohio.
“What do I do if JD talks to me again?” I asked.
“He’s not going to talk to you. I guarantee you the first meeting he had after you spoke to him was that he’s not supposed to ever respond to anything you say. Ever.”
Right.
I drove down to the parade, expecting that, at most, I would get 15-20 seconds with Vance on his way to and from his car. Little did I know, I’d spend hours with Vance and his team.
“JD, why’d you bring a Purdue pharma puppet to Ohio?” I asked next to his parade float.
“Oh my God…” JD mumbled.
I asked again. Vance’s staff stood around, confused about what was going on.
After the third question, one of his parade volunteers decided to get between Vance and myself, warning how unfortunate it would be if I had my tires slashed or hot coffee poured on me. (They somehow forgot to mention this feature in my job description). I continued walking along the parade route, waiting for more opportunities to press Vance on his abortion stance and his fundraising ties to billionaire Peter Thiel.
As the parade wound down, Vance and I neared his car.
“JD, why do you support forced birth for women?”
“Why did Tim Ryan vote with Nancy Pelosi 100 percent of the time in Congress?” JD shot back, before sticking his head into his car window and sending the driver off. He apparently didn’t care about avoiding me, so we walked together to the parade grounds. I asked Vance again about his connection to Peter Thiel.
“Hey, Tim Ryan stooge, you’ve got some tenacity, and I appreciate that,” JD said, offering me a slushie. It was hard not to appreciate how little he cared about shaking me, despite pleas from his political advisors.
On our way outside the fairgrounds toward Vance’s car, he was approached by another tracker who often followed Vance around in-character as a Californian trying to return s a surfboard that Vance left in San Francisco.
Once “surfboard guy” finished haranguing Vance, I asked him about the more than $20,000 in unpaid debt he owed to his campaign manager.
Then, JD delivered an answer into my camera — aimed at Tim Ryan — that I’m still surprised by: “Tim, in the off chance you actually see these videos, this guy has got some tenacity. The surfboard guy’s low-IQ, low-humor, so you gotta give this guy a promotion. Give the surfboard guy the boot, man.”
Once again, I had only expected 15-20 seconds with Vance.
As JD finally got into his car and drove off, I reflected on this being one of the more bizarre days in my life. (I also had to break the news to my “surf board” friend that our future senator didn’t think too highly of him — he didn’t take it well.) But it was very clear that, when Vance had nothing better to do, he very much enjoyed talking to me on the campaign trail.
Perry County Gun Bash
The next event I would follow Vance to was the “Perry County Gun Bash.”
Still, a part of me thought he might have finally learned his lesson and would stop taking my bait. But when Vance arrived, he walked past a few supporters waiting to take selfies with him.
“Hey man, I don’t know how old you are, but can I get you a beer?” Vance asked me loudly in front of the few reporters there.
“Uhhh I’m on the job,” I sputtered out.
“Okay, well you just let me know.”
He resumed greeting people at the “gun bash.” The few reporters there asked me whether he was that kind to me frequently.
I responded that he was likely only making this gesture to look good in front of reporters.
“Doesn’t matter. It’s still nice,” one said.
Even though his gesture was as hollow as it could be, I agreed.
Akron Chamber of Commerce
It was a few weeks before my next event with Vance, but I would later see him at an Akron Chamber of Commerce meeting.
To my minor embarrassment, the event organizer requested that all roughly 20 of us introduce ourselves at the start of the meeting.
“John. Student—”
“Stooge for the Tim Ryan campaign,” Vance cut me off.
Not true. I was a stooge for the DSCC. And I didn’t know why he was pretending in front of all these people that we didn’t have chemistry.
Vance proceeded to go into his usual talking points about the importance of restoring manufacturing in Ohio, making sure that “prime age” youth are staying in the workforce and able to provide for their families.
Then, a self-described Republican attorney from Akron asked him the question they were all waiting to hear:
“Thanks for being here today. You know, there are an awful lot of very, thoughtful Republicans, sort of conservative Democrats too I imagine, who really want to embrace your candidacy. But they struggle with your embracing of Donald Trump for your comments after the FBI reclaimed the government records that were found in his place at Mar-a-Lago. What can you say to assuage the concerns of those who are really good, thinking, decent Republicans, and who are a little bit afraid of another January 6?”
“Sure, sure. Well, I — January 6 was was was was not a good day in this country, to put it lightly,” Vance slowly answered. “And I think, look, I mean, my views on Trump, I was a huge Trump critic in 2016, I didn't want him to be the Republican nominee, I was a Marco Rubio guy, and then a Ted Cruz guy. And I really disliked him even after he won the nomination, and I changed my mind on Trump for the simple reason, I think a lot of the policies were really good… And I was like, look, if I really care about the middle class, and I do. This guy's policies, whatever people feel about his personality, this guy's policies are really working.”
When Vance finished, I started packing my things to leave, hoping to avoid another interaction with a Vance supporter given there was ample free coffee in the room.
But before I left the venue, the attorney who asked the above question approached me along with her husband, a reporter from northeast Ohio.
“Does he speak like that at most of his events?” She asked.
“The few that he holds, yes,” I replied.
The couple exchanged a look.
“Can we take you to dinner?”
They ended up hosting a fundraiser for Tim Ryan which raised around $50,000.
What does JD Vance actually believe?
The popular narrative is that JD Vance is a political chameleon who will do or say anything to curry favor with Donald Trump, and this is absolutely true. Many Republicans have ridden the mechanical bull named “Loyalty to Trump” in the hopes of hanging on long enough to see it pay off. But the question people should be asking is, “In a world without Trump, who is JD Vance, and what does he believe?” Because that is the side of Vance that will come out behind closed doors, and that is the man who will come out if 78-year-old Donald Trump is unable to finish his second term.
Consider Vance’s comments condemning divorce — a statement he denied delivering to me, despite having said it at a Christian high school just a few months prior. Or his now-deleted tweet where he suggested getting rid of Daylight Savings Time to boost female fertility rates. He’s also floated policies inspired by Viktor Orbán, like subsidizing couples who “actually stayed together and had kids.” This was in addition to his proposal that parents should receive additional votes based on how many children they have.
Spending hours with Vance on the campaign trail, I started to see how his personal history shaped his social views. He had a father who left him “around the time [he] started walking,” a mother who was largely absent due to struggles with addiction, and when I heard him suggest policies that punished parents for leaving their families, it felt like he thought he had cracked the code so that no kids would grow up like him. But it also felt like he was trying to legislate his personal trauma. At times, it seemed like even Vance recognized this. In an interview with Megyn Kelly, he candidly said, “I probably haven’t dealt with everything.”
So who is the real JD Vance?
At his core, JD Vance is a people pleaser. I saw it repeatedly, whether it was reassuring Rob Portman supporters — a group of Republicans who largely condemned Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 — that he, too, found Trump’s personality reprehensible, or commiserating with a liberal town hall guest on gender disparities in STEM, or his attempts to win me over.
But there was also the need for validation from stirring controversy, a willingness to use inflammatory statements to gain media attention and like most conflict-baiting internet personalities, a sense of victimhood — he portrays himself as the misunderstood advocate for America’s “forgotten communities,” which apparently justifies in his mind spreading knowingly false claims about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Though equally likely, he delivered a statement for shock value because he was upset that his comments didn’t receive traction when he had previously attempted to raise the issue without using false memes.
For those expecting Vance will disappear after the election due to his likability deficit, I’ll share a lesson I had to make peace with a few years ago… he is not going anywhere.
Much like Trump, Vance has become a master at using controversial comments to raise his profile. Consider how effectively Vance played the several news cycles surrounding the VP debate. In pre-debate coverage, I think most commentators assumed every other sentence said by Vance would be a comment about menstrual cycles and many people probably tuned in to see if he’d deliver on sharing his “bizarre” views. But on stage, he delivered polished, emotionally intelligent, 90-second answers on command. He came off as sensitive on abortion, devout on the need to protect access to healthcare — stances that were, of course, wildly different from his previous statements on right-wing podcasts.
With each fact-check, Vance gained a bigger following. His favorability ratings increased. Critics praised Vance’s “softer,” “Midwestern” touch. As Vance correctly stated in his New York Times interview following the debate, “if you watched a 45-minute JD Vance rally, you would not have been surprised.” Anyone who is capable of eliciting that much praise while simultaneously giving “damning non-answers” about the 2020 election, liberals should find terrifying.
This is someone who’s biding his time to become an intellectual leader of the MAGA movement, anticipating a time when Trump’s influence will fade. As Vance said in a 2021 interview with TIME Magazine, Trump was “the leader” of the populist conservative movement, and “if I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him.” Vance knows he only needs to do clean-up for Donald Trump for a few more years. At just 40 years old, anything he said about Trump will soon become just a blip on his radar.
As vice president, Vance would have free rein to shape federal policy within a Trump administration. What terrifies me is that no amount of media scrutiny can hold JD accountable; he thrives on controversy and relishes the challenge of making radical ideas seem palatable. He’ll empower right-wing allies by placing figures like Kevin Roberts and Russ Vought in influential Cabinet roles, elevating extremist views under the guise of “Midwestern values.” Given the harm he’s already inflicted on minority communities as a fringe political figure, imagine his impact on a national stage — appearing on Sunday shows, smoothly defending policies like family separation, stripping women’s rights and gutting agencies he deems too “woke” to exist. He wouldn’t just stir controversy; he’d enjoy it.
The Bond Between Tracker and Trackee
For all his hate, misogyny and political lies, I have to admit, I am fascinated by Vance and the enigma he is. Perhaps it comes from our shared roots — we’re both from small towns in Ohio, we both made our way to Ivy League universities thanks to generous financial aid and addiction among family members has shaped both of our stories. Even though I was horrified by his charm, and incredibly often, his knack for peddling misinformation with a smile, part of me was thrilled to see how high he could rise in the Republican Party by weaponizing persona shifts and Midwestern politeness.
In the way he spoke off-camera, It was easy to imagine how he charmed liberals at Yale Law School — and just as easily, how he could charm his way into veepstakes. I attended several rallies with JD and Don Jr., and every time Don Jr. cracked a “joke,” there was JD, front and center, laughing at all the right moments. I can guarantee you that Doug Burgum and Marco Rubio never even considered doing this.
Even though I couldn’t help but cringe at his attempts to seem relatable to “salt of the earth” Ohioans — like the times he’d carry around a Big Gulp and say, “I’m an Ohio boy, I’ve got my Big Gulp” (which, I think, was his effort to poke fun at Michael Bloomberg’s 2012 ban on Big Gulps and other large sodas?) — it was clear Vance knew how to charm the people that mattered.
On my last day of the campaign, I spent the day recording Vance as usual. But as he was leaving what I assumed would be our last time seeing each other, I couldn’t help but shake his hand.
“JD, I just want to wish you good luck,” I said. I meant this more so in regards to his personal life, rather than about the election.
“Thank you, man,” JD replied, probably a bit surprised.
As he walked away, one of his staffers turned back to ask, “Does that mean you’re voting for us?”
I thought about the time I had spent with Vance. The fact that I was chilled by his ability to peddle false talking points with a smile while also being one of the most agreeable, polite people I’d ever met. I wanted to ask if he was worried that, like the countless Republican officials who tried to influence Trump before him, he was worried about becoming yet another tile in the mosaic of dejected former Trump officials who have gone on to become great cable news contributors.
“No,” was all I managed to get out before they had to leave.
When I turned in my footage at the end of the campaign, I remember thinking, “Well, glad that guy’s not going anywhere.” Needless to say, I underestimated him. That’s a mistake we’d all do well to avoid now.
