What happens to JD Vance’s campaign in Ohio is important for all of America

JD Vance is one of the most talked-about people in politics, despite the fact that he isn’t even technically a politician.

No, Vance is a writer whose book about growing up in rural Appalachian poverty, Hillbilly Elegy, was a runaway success that was later made into a film. The book was a bestseller in 2016 and 2017, and was described by critics across the political spectrum as fascinating and insightful. Although Vance did generalise heavily from his own experience – the subtitle of the book was “A memoir of a family and culture in crisis” – he did make some interesting points about learned helplessness, discrimination and sociology.

The fact that he held his own family members and community to account for their own poverty rather than talking more widely about structural issues turned some progressive-minded people off, and Vance was certainly more celebrated among conservative critics. Nevertheless, his writing was praised.

It was in 2020, when the film of the same name came out, that people began to question the narrative’s premise more loudly. Hillbilly Elegy, the movie, was thought to be prime “Oscar bait”: guaranteed to win awards. But its melodramatic depiction of the stereotype of rednecks responsible for their own demise turned most film critics off. The Atlantic called it “one of the worst movies of the year”. Sara Stewart of the Book and Film Globe memorably stated: “There’s only a vague message about bootstraps and personal responsibility, and a whole lot of bad wigs.” Browse Rotten Tomatoes, the website that works out how a film has been received according to the tone of the critical reception, and you’ll see Hillbilly Elegy is only 25 per cent “certified fresh” – ie, only a quarter of critics had anything positive to say about it.

Undeterred, Vance leaned into the warm reception he’d been given by another set of people: conservative politicians. Republicans began upholding the film as an excellent example of why poverty and economic inequality persists across the US. The problem is “social rot”, they said; people bringing these conditions on themselves. They claim benefits and they don’t know the value of hard work, such people insisted. Left unsaid was the fact that healthcare costs are the number one reason to declare bankruptcy in the US; never mind the fact that the benefits system barely works when it comes to housing, meaning that people often live in cheap and unsustainable trailers in the countryside. Then there’s the fact that in most states, it’s housing taxes that pay for the local schools – so your education is almost guaranteed to be bad if you come from a poor area, perpetuating cycles of poverty.

It’s much easier to finger-point than to fix a system, and Republicans know this. They embraced Vance wholeheartedly, declaring that he and only he knew the truth about poor Americans. And after he was welcomed into their inner circle, he became more and more radical. When once he wrote bitterly about bagging groceries while people on benefits could afford better phones than him, now he started recycling Trumpist propaganda. And earlier this year, he decided to stand as a Republican senator for his home state of Ohio. He won the primary after an endorsement from the former president.

Yet Vance’s campaign has had its problems. He said there was something “comparable” between abortion and slavery and railed against the poor communities he hopes to represent. And this week, he made a speech about the evils of divorce, while upholding his grandparents as a shining example of sticking by each other through thick and then. The problem is that for Vance’s grandparents, “thick and thin” is pretty traumatic. In Hillbilly Elegy the book, he calls his grandfather a “violent drunk” before getting sober and his grandmother as a “violent nondrunk” and details how his grandmother once tried to kill his grandfather by pouring gasoline over him along with a lit match. The idea that this couple exemplified why you must never divorce seemed mind-boggling. It seemed that Vance was outwardly stating that people should stay in violent divorces (the reason, he said, was for the good of the children).

Liberals have responded with horror to Vance’s assertion – and some Republicans seem to have become leery of Vance, too. Vance is trailing his opponent, the Democrat Tim Ryan, by about five points. Ryan has sought to show Vance up as a radical right-winger rather than the salt-of-the-earth candidate he’d like to be seen as, and it seems it could be working. After all, Ryan is a born-and-bred, working-class Ohioan too. And he’s been running ads on Fox News that talk about “putting America first” – surely a deliberate echo of Trump’s “America First” agenda – while talking about what he agrees with Trump about in the same breath as suggesting different solutions. Some in DC seem concerned that Vance, who has little experience in politics, will be able to be savvy in the face of such an opponent.

Everything that happens in Ohio is of interest to Americans across the country because it’s a swing state. If Democrats can flip this seat, it sends an encouraging message about the midterms coming up in November. Then again, it might happen because Vance is a terrible candidate.

Conversely, if Vance wins and goes to the Senate, then we’ll know that some sections of the US remain just as radical as they were under Trump – and that means that if the Democrats have a hope in hell of winning again in 2024, it’ll be with a milquetoast Biden agenda again rather than anything more progressive.