Ohio Senate candidate J. D. Vance has found himself on the wrong side of Republican voters and even some of his own donors over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Ohio Senate candidate J. D. Vance has found himself on the wrong side of Republican voters and even some of his own donors over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
W ith one month to go until the Ohio Republican primary, Senate candidate J. D. Vance took the day off from the campaign trail in order to travel to Washington, D.C., and speak at a paleoconservative foreign-policy conference attended by fewer than 200 people.
The mood of Vance’s speech and the conference in general was that of an embattled, and at times embittered, minority.
During his 20-minute talk, Vance aired a litany of grievances against the establishment media on the right and left, Bill Kristol, George Soros, Vance’s alma mater Yale Law School, and even his own campaign’s donors.
“Foreign policy is uniquely dangerous,” Vance said at the March 31 “Up from Chaos” conference organized by the American Conservative and American Moment. “It is kind of okay to be on the wrong side of the consensus on trade” and immigration, “but if you are on the wrong side of the foreign-policy consensus in this town, it is remarkable how much the media organs of both the establishment Right and the Left will go after you.”
“Even donors,” Vance continued. “The first time that I’ve ever actually had donors push back against all the crazy things that I say over the course of my Senate campaign is on this Russia–Ukraine thing. The craziest idea that I’ve had in the last year and a half . . . is that we should not get involved in a nuclear war with Russia. That’s a really dangerous idea.”
That, of course, is not close to the craziest idea that Vance has floated in his campaign to be crazier than Republican rival Josh Mandel: Just last week, he said that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) “did nothing wrong” when she spoke at a conference organized by a white-supremacist Holocaust denier.
The remarks that actually got J. D. Vance in trouble with J. D. Vance donors occurred a few days before Russia launched its unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” Vance said on Steve Bannon’s podcast. “I’m sick of Joe Biden focusing on the border of a country I don’t care about while he lets the border of his own country become a total war zone.”
At last Thursday’s conference, Vance portrayed himself as a brave truth-teller speaking out against powerful financial interests. “A lot of people get very rich when America goes to war,” he said. “A lot of people get very rich when America funds wars in far-flung parts of the world, but not very many people get very rich when America solves its biggest problems here at home.”
Vance also blamed elite institutions — from Ivy League schools to organizations funded by George Soros — for forging an interventionist foreign-policy consensus. But George Soros is not some shadowy figure holding the anti-interventionist Right back. The progressive billionaire has actually teamed up with libertarian Charles Koch to fund the anti-interventionist Quincy Institute.
Yet for all of Vance’s populist complaints about the elite foreign-policy consensus, it has been obvious since the first days of Russia’s war in Ukraine that his real problem is not donors but the overwhelming majority of Republican voters. A Quinnipiac poll in late February found that 80 percent of Republicans believed Biden had not been tough enough on Russia, while only 2 percent of Republicans believed Biden had been “too tough.” After the war began, Missouri GOP senator Josh Hawley — a hero of the populist “New Right” who has endorsed Vance — immediately started to sound more like the late John McCain than Vance in his statements on Russia. And when the House of Representatives voted on a resolution calling for the United States to “deliver additional and immediate defensive security assistance to help Ukraine,” it passed by the wildly lopsided margin of 426–3.
Two out of those three “no” votes — Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Matt Rosendale of Montana — were keynote speakers at the Up from Chaos conference: Rosendale defended his opposition to arming Ukraine, and Massie called for the abolition of NATO. “NATO is obsolete,” Massie said during his speech. “If I could, we would dissolve it tomorrow, [or] at least get the United States out of it.”
Another conference speaker, William Ruger, who was nominated by Trump to serve as ambassador to Afghanistan after the 2020 election but never confirmed, suggested that the United States could avoid “getting involved with some of these interventions abroad” by shrinking the U.S. Army. “Eventually, I think these financial constraints will kick in and there will have to be a reckoning,” Ruger said. “At that point, rather than saying, ‘We shouldn’t have a strong national defense; we should cut the defense budget by half,’ we should say, ‘Let’s hold the line on [the defense budget]; let’s spend it more towards the Navy and the Air Force and Space and less toward the Army.”
Strictly in terms of electoral politics, it is not clear what Vance thought he would gain by leaving Ohio in order to attend a small gathering of activists dedicated to promoting foreign-policy views that currently represent the tiniest fringe of the Republican electorate. But he lingered at the conference for hours, and for a guy who claimed he doesn’t care “what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” he sure did have a lot to say about the conflict.
Vance spoke about Ukraine but offered little in terms of a substantive critique of America’s policy. “I happen to think that Russia should not have gone into Ukraine,” he said. “So, fine, morally condemn it all you want, but at the end of the day our foreign policy needs to be a little bit more sophisticated than the guy in Russia is good and the — sorry, the guy in Russia is bad and the guy in Ukraine is good.”
“I’ve been supportive of some of the sanctions that we’ve done, but sanctions — some of them are good and some of them don’t make any sense,” he added. He singled out sanctioning fertilizer as a bad idea but didn’t explain why any sanctions against Russia make sense in light of his belief that supporting Ukraine isn’t “in the vital national-security interests of the country.”
It is still too early to say whether Vance will join Massie, Rosendale, and Kentucky GOP senator Rand Paul as an ideological ally in Congress. The most recent public poll, conducted in early March, showed Vance stuck in third place with 11 percent of the primary vote, just a few points ahead of the fourth- and fifth-place candidates. Vance still has a shot because the winning candidate in the five-way race could prevail with less than 30 percent of the vote, and a late 15-point surge is far from unthinkable in a five-way primary election.
But if he loses, Vance won’t be able to blame a lack of support from elites. He started out the campaign with a $10 million check from billionaire Peter Thiel to his super PAC, and he now has been endorsed by Greene and boosted by Donald Trump Jr. and Tucker Carlson, the host of America’s most-watched cable-news program.
No, if Vance loses despite all that — Greene’s and Trump Jr.’s backing, Thiel’s cash, and Carlson’s airtime — it will be a sign that his brand of populism simply isn’t as popular as he and many others imagined.