BREAKING: View from Ohio: The Short Strange Trip of JD Vance...

The Top 10 Things to Know About A VP Pick With 1/6 the Experience Quayle Had

I’ve been around Ohio politics for some time. I’ve seen a good deal of drama. Ups and downs. A fair share of surprises. And a long, ruthless attack on democracy.

But few things have been as head-scratching as the rise of JD Vance—both within Ohio, and now nationally. And that continued today with the news that Trump selected him to be his running mate.

By any traditional standards, it’s a bizarre pick. Vance wouldn’t seem to bring much to the ticket—but boot-licking loyalty (and perhaps some big tech dollars for Trump).

And as for governing, he brings even less.

Think about it: When George HW Bush selected Dan Quayle to be Vice President, it was roundly criticized. Quayle was too green. No real experience in elected office.

In comparison to Vance’s experience, Quayle looks like a wise and grizzled veteran when selected.

With one year and six months under his belt as a US Senator, Vance has less than 1/7th of the experience Quayle had when selected and nominated.

But that’s just the tip of a very large iceberg when it comes to his odd rise.

Since Vance is the only one of the four major candidates who is both new to the national ticket, and whose record has been largely unexplored until now, we can only hope the press digs into the details. Because once you look at his path before becoming a Senator, you will ask: is this really someone with the experience and track record to be next in line to the presidency? And why would Trump have picked him?

And you will definitely be left scratching your head.

To make sure folks see these issues, I’m going to list the Top 10 Head-Scratching Aspects of JD Vance’s Rise that need to be explored. (And no, this won’t be about his book—that may be the one thing that has been closely scrutinized, both praised and criticized).

So the FIRST FIVE of my Top 10 involve Vance’s record before becoming a Senator:

10. In 2016, Vance Wondered if Trump was “America’s Hitler”

Vance tweeted this the other day, outraging many with his reckless rhetoric that criticizing Donald Trump is what “led directly” to the attempted assassination:

Of course, the effort to chill Americans from raising legitimate concerns about Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies is yet another step towards authoritarianism. Talk of violence is not fair game. Talk of threats to democracy? Clearly the heart of this election.

But the true irony is that it was Vance himself, not long ago, who speculated to a friend whether Trump was “America’s Hitler”…

Here are the specifics…

Pretty discouraging, JD.

Especially now that you’re blaming others for violence for saying less than what you yourself said only a few years back.

And more than “discouraging,” JD, is watching someone who could wonder if someone is “America’s next Hitler” one year—then six years later, proactively defend everything that man does going forward. Actually, it’s downright disturbing.

By the way, Vance had a lot more to say about Trump than this, including that he assumed a woman who accused Trump of sexual assault was telling the truth, and he even liked a tweet that said Trump had committed “serial sexual assault.”

9. Vance’s Political Parachute into Ohio, then His Quick Exit

So yes, Vance is now the Senator from Ohio. We’ll talk about how he got there below.

For now, know that he occupies a seat once held by iconic and proud Ohioans such as John Glenn and George Voinovich. In comparison, Vance seems torn about whether he likes to be in Ohio at all. He’s sort of been a ghost, both before and after his Senate run. And when he did show up here, it seemed like a chore—the entire point of which was simply to run for office.

The basic timeline is as follows:

Vance attended law school at Yale from 2011-2013, says he was in and out of Ohio for stints in the years that followed, but definitely moved to San Francisco—where he lived for a number of years, worked in venture capital and wrote his famous memoir.

He began making appearances in Ohio after the book came out, along with joining CNN as a commentator, then officially moved back to Ohio in 2017—which he humbly announced in a New York Times editorial.

Look at that cartoon….and here I though Columbus, where he moved, was a boomtown (it is!)

The tone of this op-ed was as if this move back to Ohio was a major sacrifice—he was taking one for the team by gracing us with his return. (“It wasn’t an easy choice. I scaled back my commitments to a job I love because of the relocation.”….“not every motivation is rational”).

Apparently he was so fond of his new home he considered running against Sherrod Brown as early as January 2018.

He ultimately ran for Senate in 2021-2022, and yes, it was during that Senate run that Ohioans could’ve caught sight of JD in Ohio. But even then, his Senate race was noteworthy for not having much on-the-ground presence. One well-known conservative radio host complained that “‘The Republican faithful are telling me they can't find J.D. Vance with a search warrant’….[V]oters, party activists, and even statewide officials are telling him that Vance has been phoning it in. Vance is allegedly missing from many of the county fairs, party meetings, and campaign stops where candidates in this state are expected to be."

The pattern continued after Vance won the Senate seat. He’s hardly been seen in his claimed hometown of Cincinnati—I ask around, and I don’t know anyone who’s actually seen him at events beyond pure politics, enjoying the Queen City as the rest of us do, etc.

No shock, the Washingtonian reported only months after he won in November 2022, that Vance had already bought a home in Alexandria, Virginia. Maybe his neighbors there see him more than we do in Cincinnati.

8. “Our Ohio Renewal”…NOT Renewed and Some Really Sketchy Spending

When Vance announced to the world his return to Ohio, there were two major things he said he’d be doing.

The first was starting a non-profit called Our Ohio Renewal to battle the opioid crisis and take on “joblessness and broken families.” Vance explained: “I actually care about solving some of these things.” In his “I’m going home” op-ed, he added: “I’m founding an organization to combat Ohio’s opioid epidemic.”

Well, this non-profit turned out to be as scammy as Trump University. As the NYT summarized:

“Mr. Vance’s nonprofit group raised only about $220,000, hired only a handful of staff members, shrank drastically in 2018 and died for good in 2021. It left only the faintest mark on the state it had been meant to change, leaving behind a pair of op-eds and two tweets. (Mr. Vance also started a sister charity, which paid for a psychiatrist to spend a year in a small-town Ohio clinic. Then it shuttered, too.)”

Wouldn’t you know it? The nonprofit seemed awfully focused on political matters: “some of the nonprofit group’s own workers said they had drawn a different conclusion: They had been lured by the promise of helping Ohio, but instead had been used to help Mr. Vance start his career in politics….During its brief life, Mr. Vance’s organization paid a political consultant who also advised Mr. Vance about entering the 2018 Senate race. It paid an assistant who helped schedule Mr. Vance’s political speeches. And it paid for a survey of “Ohio citizens” that several of the staff members said they had never seen.”

And yes. Vance was considering running for Senate as early as 2018, so that “nonprofit” survey seemed well-timed.

Overall, the non-profit “spent more on ‘management services’ provided by its executive director Jai Chabria — who also serves as Vance's top political advisor — than it did on programs to fight opioid abuse.” (Chabria was the one who fielded calls about that potential 2018 Senate run, saying “The amount of support for J.D. Vance is incredible.”)

One other thing: when it wasn’t spending money for what looked to be political maneuvering and staffing, the nonprofit’s opioid-fighting work was hugely problematic. At one point, its “addiction specialist” was a doctor “tainted by ties [to] the institute that employed her and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin.” She had previously published articles “questioning the role of prescription painkillers in the national opioid crisis.” Sounds really helpful….for Big Pharma. And not Ohioans, who were in the epicenter of the prescription drug and pill mill crisis, which most certainly fueled the broader opioid and heroin crisis that’s devastated communities ever since.

7. Ohio Job Creator?

In addition to his quickly defunct non-profit, Vance also claimed to be creating jobs in Ohio through venture capital work. “In reality, though, it's not clear what, if anything, Vance has achieved through his company or his charity.”

Vance hopped through three venture funds in four years, ultimately starting a venture capital firm to invest in Ohio and the Midwest. But “only a year after launching Narya, Vance took a leave of absence from the firm to pursue his political ambitions. Now the firm, based in Cincinnati, is being run by one of his partners from [] Connecticut….[O]ne of the fund's investors said that Narya had promised him Vance wouldn't abandon the firm for politics. ‘I was personally disappointed,’ the investor told Insider, ‘after they said exactly this wouldn't happen.’”

In debates with Tim Ryan for the Senate seat, Vance would make highly questionable claims about the number of jobs his venture work had created—leaving the impression that his funds were the only investors in the Ohio businesses where they invested dollars. A claim of having created close to 1,000 jobs was broken down by one venture analyst: “If one assumes that each investor can take an equal share of the job creation (which is a reasonable assumption) then at best Narya can claim 750 jobs divided by 46 investors which equals 16 jobs.”

6. A Campaign Going Nowhere, Bailed Out by Trump and a Billionaire, Still Struggled

This weak connection back to Ohio, but his strong connection to monied venture capital interests, also explain the next aspect of JD Vance’s odd rise.

It gets lost now, but the truth is, Vance didn’t catch on politically in Ohio until saved by those big-money forces and Trump time and again.

For most of the race to replace retiring Senator Rob Portman, Vance struggled. He was unable to raise much money both in the primary, and even after. This forced him to give himself a large loan ($700,000) to get through the primary, and after the primary, his first task was to raise money to erase a large debt he had run up. So how did he get through that primary? Simple: he was bailed out by $10 million in outside spending by the billionaire ($10 million) who hired him for his first venture job.

Later in the general, the GOP Senate Leadership Fund had to parachute in and spend $28 million to bail him out again “amid concerns about his strength in a GOP-leaning state”—a diversion of money that earned criticism because it meant less dollars in Senate races Republicans went on to lose.

And that’s just the money side.

Vance also was struggling to get any traction politically. As Politico wrote, even late in the primary, “He was lagging in the polls. His cash was running low. With the state’s primary fast approaching, J.D. Vance’s chances of winning the Ohio GOP Senate nomination didn’t look promising.”

His own consultants warned of his “precipitous decline” in internal polls (he was underwater with key GOP voters) due to his past anti-Trump positions.

The consultant urged a “course correction,” and they got one in a few months, when rumors began that Trump was considering endorsing him (Vance and his billionaire backer had met with Trump in Mar-a-Lago the prior year).

When rumors circulated that Trump was considering endorsing Vance, Vance’s standing was so poor in Ohio that Republican leaders across the state (including the current State Republican chair) wrote an open letter pleading with Trump not to endorse him.

Trump went on to endorse Vance late in the GOP primary. That, and the outside $10M ad blitz, are clearly the only reasons that Vance went on to win.

BUT….even with all that help, and in a state where the GOP Governor (DeWine) defeated the Democratic candidate by more than 25 points, and the rest of the GOP ticket won by the high teens or low 20s, (judicial races by the low teens), Vance only won by just over 6 points. As dramatic an underperformance of candidates on the same ticket as you’ll see in Ohio.

Ok, that’s enough for now.

Next up, for the Top 5, we’ll explore Vance’s record in his 18 + months in elected office.

It also is pretty spotty….