The Ohio Republican Senate primary was an unusually tough, high-dollar race. It was also a test case. The leading candidates seemed to represent different theories of “Trumpism.”
Was it that voters wanted a businessman? Well, Mike Gibbons was a successful businessman.
Was it that Trump was “the craziest son of a b****” in the room, as Thomas Massie sometimes wondered? Then Josh Mandel was your man.
Or was it the “America First” agenda on the immigration, trade, and foreign policy? If that’s what you thought, then J. D. Vance was your candidate.
There are a lot of cynical people in Washington, people committed to the agenda Vance campaigned against, who thought that running on a substantive America First agenda was a loser. They were reveling in Vance’s “low polls” during a long period in which there were no reliable polls of the state.
But Vance’s advantage was that he campaigned on the politics he believes in. That’s one of the reasons he was able to campaign so much more than his opponents; he doesn’t need to read from cue cards. It’s why he was able to constantly reiterate his position on the Ukraine war with confidence, even as his opponents got lost while searching for their own views. Much has been made of Vance’s supposed transformation from the author of Hillbilly Elegy to the Senate candidate endorsed by Marjorie Taylor Greene. He shifted his assessment of Trump, absolutely, but his politics have remained much the same. Even Vance’s vengeful former roommate — who tried to harm his campaign by sharing a text showing that, years ago, Vance made an overheated comparison of Trump to Hitler — ended up proving the point. In that text exchange, Vance was saying that the Republican Party needed to deliver tangible benefits to working-class white people who have migrated into the party. That’s the message he had three years ago, too.
This was a useful experiment, and there are more of them going on in these 2022 primaries. Now, Vance’s job is to win the general election and be the senator Ohioans deserve.