Slate article on JD Vance

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/10/jd-vance-tim-ryan-ohio-senate-trump-midterms.html

snip-"But despite being vouched for by the MAGA king in a state that went for Trump over Biden by a nearly 8-point margin—and then narrowly winning the primary—Vance has struggled in the general election race. What was expected to be an easy Republican victory has turned out to be a tight competition with a Democrat, the Youngstown-area Rep. Tim Ryan, who has cast himself as a quasi-independent who agrees with Trump on trade, and who has an easier time claiming Ohio bona fides because he has served as a representative there for 20 years."

snip-"The enthusiasm with which Ryan has praised Trump and attacked the national Democratic Party seems to have taken the Ohio GOP by surprise. In press releases, in TV commercials, and in person, they seem almost hurt by it, as if they can’t believe he wouldn’t just play fair and tell everyone that he’s a regular old liberal."

snip-" Although he’s stopped short of endorsing D’Souza or Greene’s more florid theories about events in 2020, he nonetheless said that the 2020 election had been “stolen” from Trump, said that he had been wrong to believe Trump would be a poor president, and flew to Mar-a-Lago to successfully seek the big man’s endorsement. He suggested in a tweet that some feminists believe “it’s bad for women to become mothers” but “liberating” for them “to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs.” He defended comments he’d made in 2021 about the potential upside, for one’s children, of sticking out an abusive marriage."


snip"...But by 2020, the state was 12 points redder than the country as a whole. The cavemen, and cavewomen, had taken over. Ohio is holding its current elections using gerrymandered maps that the state’s own Supreme Court has ruled are illegal under the terms of a voter-passed referendum, and it passed a law which made all abortion illegal once the Dobbs decision went into effect (though that one is currently blocked in the courts). One state senator asked during a COVID hearing in 2020 whether “the colored population do not wash their hands as well as other groups,” while a state rep cited the Holocaust as the kind of “divisive concept” that should be taught, in schools, from multiple points of view. Jordan was the House of Representatives’ most vocal promoter of the effort to challenge election results on Jan. 6. Not so nice!


More at article.