Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio is in a tight race for the Senate seat vacated by a retiring GOP incumbent against JD Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” and a former “Never Trump” Republican who has since embraced the former president and received his endorsement.
A lifelong Ohioan raised just outside of Youngstown, Ryan, 49, has represented his state in Congress since 2002 and was briefly a 2020 presidential candidate.
After attending a wellness retreat in 2008, Ryan became an advocate of “mindfulness” – a settling of the mind and total immersion in the present moment – even publishing a 2012 book on the subject.
Republicans had been expecting that the Ohio Senate race would be an easy win. But Ryan has shown he has a few tricks up his sleeve.
Campaigning in a state that voted for Trump over Biden by around 8 points in 2020, Ryan has made clear he agrees with Trump on trade and disagrees with Democrats on issues ranging from student loans to border security.
In a state hit hard by the opioid crisis, Ryan has been outspoken that more needs to be done to stop fentanyl from coming across the US-Mexico border and eventually making its way to Ohio.
"I'm talking economics, jobs, wages, pensions, growing the economy, manufacturing, taking on China – bread-and-butter issues,” he told Fox News in a recent interview.
In an interview with Politico last month, Ryan said his independent stance on so many issues would probably make him a “royal pain in the ass” for Democrats if he is elected to the Senate, saying he would be “beholden to absolutely nobody”.
Nevertheless, his opponent JD Vance has tried to paint him as a leftist who blindly follows the lead of congressional Democrats and has been a “rubber stamp” for President Joe Biden.
Vance, 38, is the acclaimed author of the 2016 bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy”, an autobiographical look at the struggles of the White working class viewed through the prism of his own family history. It was subsequently turned into a Netflix film directed by Ron Howard.
The man who once warned that Donald Trump was “dangerous” and expressed a hope that the Republican Party would move away from Trump toward some sort of “reckoning” has since changed his tone.
“Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016,” Vance told Fox News last year, adding: “I regret being wrong about the guy. I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.”
He has also adopted some of the more combative rhetorical flourishes of his new patron, denouncing the “idiots” in Washington and the “scumbags” in the media.
Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio, where his grandparents had moved from Kentucky for a steel mill job, according to an account in The New York Times. His mother struggled with drugs and Vance was largely raised by his grandparents before enlisting in the Marines, where he served in Iraq doing public affairs. He graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State University and went on to graduate from Yale Law School before working in San Francisco’s Silicon Valley as a venture capitalist for German-American billionaire Peter Thiel.
In June, watchdog groups filed a complaint alleging that the Vance campaign and Peter Thiel illegally coordinated to circumvent campaign finance laws. The complaint said Vance's campaign and super PAC Protect Ohio Values used a secret website to share information including polling data, opposition research, strategy documents and advice on how to get an endorsement from Trump. Federal law prohibits super PACs and political campaigns from working together.
Vance’s association with Thiel has complicated his campaign on another front. A June video showing captive American fighters in Ukraine who had been tortured appeared on Rumble, a video-sharing platform favored by the right wing and backed by both Vance and Thiel. When Russian state media service RT was forced off the air in the US and Europe over the invasion of Ukraine, Rumble began featuring its live stream.
In May 2021, Rumble received a substantial investment from Narya, a venture capital firm co-founded by Vance, with additional backing from Thiel. Vance also took a personal stake in Rumble worth between $100,000 and $250,000, The New York Times reported.
Vance’s willingness to offer a platform to Russian propaganda dovetails with his stated ambivalence about the war in Ukraine. “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” he said in a podcast interview in February. “I’m sick of Joe Biden focusing on the border of a country I don’t care about while he lets the border of his own country become a total war zone.”
But that stance may be coming back to bite him. More than 40,000 Ohio residents have Ukrainian heritage, according to Census Bureau figures. And so Vance has reversed course once again, arguing that he only meant that nuclear war with Russia was to be avoided and that the situation in Ukraine does not affect “vital” US national security interests.
But even the National Review, the longtime standard-bearer for American conservatism, held his feet to the fire for his comment, writing that, ‘if you play a video clip of Vance uttering that single sentence – “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another’ – most Republican voters will recoil”.
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