Despite Ohio crucially sending Barack Obama to the White House twice, it voted for his presidential successor Donald Trump with a margin of over 8 points in both his successful 2016 election and his 2020 failure.
Sherrod Brown earned Democrats its first Senate seat in nearly a decade with his 2006 victory, but his lead shrunk from 12 points to the single digits in subsequent reelections. Ohio can reasonably expect that Rob Portman, the outgoing senator who won his reelection by more than 20 points, will be replaced by a fellow Republican. Given President Joe Biden’s razor-thin control of both the Senate and the House, the entire nation has a vested interest in who wins in the 2022 primary for Portman’s seat.
Yet, having learned absolutely nothing from Trump trolling his way into the Oval Office, the Very Principled Conservatives who have found themselves rooting not just for Biden to beat Trump in 2020 but also to hand the Senate to pro-abortion, pro-Critical Race Theory, and pro-gun confiscation extremists are now waging war against the single candidate most likely to beat Josh Mandel.
Mandel, the former Ohio treasurer, nearly bested Brown in the senator’s 2012 election. Given his otherwise straight victory of winning Ohio races and his current lead in the polls, Mandel is the candidate to beat in the 2022 primary. And with record, actually principled conservatives and Democrats alike ought to have a vested interest in seeing another Republican does so.
That candidate, in any sane world, should be J.D. Vance, the conservative with the name recognition, oratory ability, and policy chops to beat Mandel. And yet, Very Principled Conservatives have turned Vance into enemy No. 1.
The predator-enabling goons at the Lincoln Project have predictably gone after Vance with a characteristic eyesore of an attack ad, with the group’s disgraced former co-founder deeming the new candidate “the Sand Hill fascist.”
Joe Walsh, the n-word using, Birther conspiracy theorist, Very Principled Conservative #NeverTrumper chimed in with a classy “f*** you” to Vance for “selling” his soul to Trump. Over at Bulwark, the online refugee camp for those who left the GOP once they realized the party no longer celebrated illegal bombing campaigns in the Middle East, Tim Miller branded Vance a “racist” for lamenting the violent crime crisis in America’s cities and lambasting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley pedaling critical race theory as a means to understand “white rage” (whatever that, per Milley’s defense, means).
But it’s Jonathan Last who really gives the game away.
“There’s almost nothing I want more out of the midterms than to see Josh Mandel crush J.D. Vance,” Last wrote. “Is Josh Mandel the Laura Loomer of Ohio politics? Sure. But at least he believes this stuff. J.D Vance is, was, and always will be nothing more than a guy on the make. Something which — if I may say — was obvious even back when he was doing his Trump-skeptical schtick and pretending to be the hillbilly whisperer for NYT readers.”
A cynic would say Last is simply shilling for The Bulwark’s founder and editor-at-large Bill Kristol, who crucially recruited Mandel for the 2012 Senate run against Brown that catapulted him to state fame. But the truth is a lot dumber and even more simple: These people have zero interest in actually “conserving conservatism.”
Like the nitwit liberals of 2016 who gambled a Trump primary win would blow up the GOP instead of giving it the complete control of the federal government, today’s cretin Democrats cosplaying as Very Principled Conservatives want to watch a Republican Party that no longer embraces their beloved zombie Bushism burn to the ground.
For starters, the notion that Vance is simply some opportunistic and hypocritical hick while Mandel is a true believer is laughable.
He campaigned with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and defended atrocities in Afghanistan. Compare that to the early plaudits that Vance, then much more critical of a candidate who hadn’t proven himself on his pledge to foreign policy realism, gave toward Trump’s campaign.
“To those voters furious at politicians who sent their children to fight and bleed and die in Iraq, he tells them what no major Republican politician in a decade has said — that the war was a terrible mistake imposed on the country by an incompetent president,” Vance wrote in 2016 of Trump’s appeal to white voters. Trump proved he was serious about shattering the foreign policy consensus once in office, and Vance adjusted accordingly.
But even more important than the question of hypocrisy is that of reality. In a republic with a first-past-the-post democratic process, a two-party system is all but guaranteed.
Given that more than half of all of the nation’s states have a partisan lean of fewer than 10 points, voters of all political stripes have a personal interest in both parties preserving acceptable policies and candidates. With a general election result ultimately determined by just 81,000 votes in four states — an absolutely legitimate victory, but a narrow one, nonetheless — conservatives ought to have thanked their lucky stars Democratic primary voters overwhelmingly elected the (relatively) mainstream liberal rather than the Corbynite socialist.
Any liberal with more than a few brain cells to rub together would see their own vested interest in the GOP choosing a J.D. Vance over a Josh Mandel to become the most likely next senator representing a rapidly reddening swing state.
Vance would hardly be my first choice as a candidate in a vacuum. I, and much of the more libertarian-leaning faction of the Right, don’t share the five-alarm-fire sense of panic over Big Tech and woke corporatism — business in China being the notable exception that increasingly unites conservatives across the spectrum — and on trade and natalist policy, our differences may run even deeper ideologically speaking.
But there’s no question Vance’s brand of populist conservatism, or whatever you want to call it, is deeply serious and thoughtful in a way that Trump’s never was and utterly devoid of the racial resentment and QAnon conspiracy theorizing of a disturbing coterie of some of Trump’s supporters.
To quote Kevin Williamson, who literally wrote the book mocking the “forgotten” white America that Vance urged elite circles to try and take seriously, “The contrast between Vance and Donald Trump — a New York City rich kid who inherited a vast fortune and then spent much of his adult life in bankruptcy court — is almost novelistic in its symmetry. Vance is the real deal, a man of genuine accomplishment.”
Both Williamson and I would much rather see the very real Trumpian base channeled toward the good faith intellectualism of Vance rather than the offensively sophomoric and race-baiting trollery of Mandel.
The utterly unlikable Clintons aside, the forces that propelled Trump to the presidency will not fade, and the nearly-octogenarian Biden can only keep the reins of the Democratic Party from hands of the utterly unlikable Kamala Harris for so long.
2016 ought to have taught the new Democrats that, even with the likes of Trump, political power still swings like a pendulum. When Republicans return to power, they’d be much better off with a Vance and not a Mandel in the driver’s seat.
