YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — One week after packing the Mahoning County Republican Party storefront headquarters, to the point that people were spilling out the door to get a chance to hear what he had to say, J.D. Vance squeaked out a victory in the crowded Ohio Republican primary. He will face Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) in this fall’s midterm elections.
Mahoning County Republican Chairman Tom McCabe said the event really showed the energy Vance had harnessed in the final weeks of the primary. “People really started to pull in his direction, and it showed at that event,” he said.
Like former President Donald Trump in the 2016 Ohio primary, Vance won both in Mahoning County and throughout the Steel Valley counties of Trumbull, Stark, Ashtabula, Columbiana, and Portage. Most of these were solidly Democratic until recently. Some have since become Republican, and others will be competitive this fall.
Vance prevailed in the crowded six-way race that included the insurgent candidacy of anti-Trump state Sen. Matt Dolan. Dolan, who poured more than $10 million into his campaign, nearly beat Josh Mandel, the onetime front-runner and former state treasurer, for second place thanks to a last-minute burst of fresh support. Former state party Chairwoman Jane Timken finished fifth, with investment banker Mike Gibbons rounding out the field.
The seat became open when Republican Sen. Rob Portman declined to seek reelection this year.
Youngstown State University political science professor Paul Sracic said that, for a long time, this had been anybody’s race to win in Ohio. “You had five fairly evenly matched candidates, four of who differed very little on important Republican issues such as trade, abortion, and immigration,” he said. Most importantly, none of them were starved for funds, and they were all able to blanket the airwaves with ads.
A major reason for Vance’s late surge was his endorsement by Trump. And Vance might have won that thanks to his superior debate performance. “Maybe this was why Trump endorsed him despite the negative things Vance had said about him back in 2016,” Sracic said. “Trump likes winners and may have sensed that he found one in J.D. Vance.”
Ohio has shifted pretty hard to the right since it first gave Barack Obama won its electoral votes by 4 points in 2008. Trump handily won the state in both 2016 and 2020.
Vance will face Ryan of Niles, Ohio, who easily won his primary. The Trumbull County Democrat struggled in 2020 to hold on to voters in a district that he has easily won for nearly two decades. He lost his home county for the first time since entering Congress in 2003.
Ryan went from consistently winning his congressional seat by well over 65% to narrowly winning it with 52% of the vote in 2020.
A couple of things have hurt Ryan and his connection to the culturally conservative Democrats who supported him throughout his career. That begins with his decision in 2015 to abandon his long-held anti-abortion position while toying with a run for higher office. The Niles native had once sat on the board of the Democrats for Life in America.
His leftward shift when he was running for president in 2019 also put him at odds with working-class voters. All of these things have distanced him from the very voters he needed not just to hold his own congressional seat but also to build a coalition to win this Senate race.
“Working-class voters are lost to him,” Sracic said. “So he needs to motivate African American voters in cities and grab moderates. He is a candidate built to capture voters who are probably unreachable to him.”
Sracic added that the Ryan campaign cannot be too happy with this result, saying, “One of the reasons Democrats like Ryan is his biography. He comes from the Mahoning Valley in Ohio, which was ground zero in 2016 for Obama-Trump voters. Vance’s own working-class roots in Middletown, Ohio, however, effectively negate that advantage.”
Sracic said the only possible path to victory for a Democrat in Ohio in 2022 will be through the suburbs.
“But with Vance, however, with his Yale law degree and venture capitalist background, will likely be appealing to many of these college-educated suburban voters,” he said.
