Opinion: As a rural Ohioan, I see J.D. Vance for who he is

J.D. Vance can spin a lot of things about his life, but we can see who he really is by examining the core values that animate him, and in that respect, J.D. Vance doesn’t look like the people I know from home.

During the 2022 midterm elections, when Vance was running against Democrat Rep. Tim Ryan for an open U.S. Senate seat, I had plenty of conversations with members of my union, the Ohio Federation of Teachers, throughout rural Ohio. These teachers, paraprofessionals, intervention specialists, guidance counselors and other educators love their schools, and they want to elect candidates who will support real solutions in their school districts, like improving career technical education, providing healthcare resources in their schools and improving broadband access. All they heard from Vance were attacks on teachers and plans to starve public schools of funding.

Vance’s career has been built on a phony image of him as a product of and de facto spokesperson for poor, rural Appalachians, despite the fact that he was raised in a middle-class family in Middletown, Ohio – a city of about 50,000 people situated between Cincinnati and Dayton. His book Hillbilly Elegy has been touted as a handbook for understanding Appalachia, but I challenge rural Americans to see if they recognize themselves in its pages. Vance depicts rural communities using derisive stereotypes that lack any understanding of the impact of generational poverty—nor does he understand the challenges of living in areas devoid of good jobs, strong public schools, reliable transportation systems or affordable healthcare.

While some of his characterizations could be overlooked, his opportunism is where rural voters will likely struggle with his lack of authenticity. After his book catapulted him to fame in 2016, in part through his lament for the scourge of drug addiction, Vance cynically started a phony charity, Our Ohio Renewal, under the guise of working on opioid addiction, joblessness and broken families. The organization fizzled out after barely doing any work other than help Vance launch his political career—in fact, one of the charity’s lone accomplishments was to send an addiction specialist with ties to Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, to Ohio’s Appalachian region.

His opportunism and lack of authenticity is also what drove him from being a firm critic of Donald Trump to becoming one of Trump’s biggest sycophants and political beneficiaries. In 2016, Vance labeled himself as a “Never Trump guy,” calling Trump “noxious,” “reprehensible” and “America’s Hitler,” and even floated the idea that he might vote for Hillary Clinton. He quickly changed his tune when he decided to run for U.S. Senate in Ohio as a Republican and wanted Trump’s endorsement. His craven flip-flopping is exactly the type of disingenuous self-promotion that rural voters can see a mile away.

Vance also fails when it comes to recognizing rural voters’ work ethic and our love for our hometowns. Though many rural folks like myself have moved away from our hometowns, we carry an attachment to our rural roots and a respect for the hardworking people who keep our towns alive. Yet Vance has built his political brand by scolding and shaming poor and working-class families for the problems they face. He blames joblessness, and the issues that arise from it, on the workers themselves, labeling them as “lazy,” instead of blaming the manufacturers and businesses who have pulled out of the area or overlooked rural communities from the beginning.

As a candidate for U.S. Senate, Vance got ahead by sucking up to billionaires like Trump and Peter Thiel, his former employer and mentor at a venture capitalist firm in Silicon Valley. As a senator, Vance has continued his subservience to the billionaire class by voting against working people 100% of the time, as tallied by the AFL-CIO. Vance also has close ties to the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025—he even wrote a glowing forward to an upcoming book by Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation’s president who helped organize Project 2025. By slashing funding and staff for education, healthcare and other critical government services, Project 2025 would have devastating impacts on small towns and their residents.  This extreme agenda runs counter to the rural notion of helping out our neighbors — regardless of what they look like or who they are.

Where I’m from, we mind our own business and we trust others to mind theirs, especially on personal issues, like what our family looks like and how or when we want to grow our family. But J.D. Vance doesn’t understand this. He thinks that “small towns” equals “small-minded.” That’s why he’s willing to invite the government into our bedrooms and doctor appointments to impose his religious ideology on everyone.

Donald Trump might think that rural voters, Appalachian voters or Midwestern voters will look at J.D. Vance and see ourselves. We don’t. We see the mine owner who poisons the air and water; we see the factory owner who leaves town to make a higher profit overseas; we see the Big Ag executives who make it near impossible for family farms to thrive—and we see the empty suit politicians who sell us out to please their billionaire donors.

This op-ed was originally published by Barn Raiser: https://barnraisingmedia.com/rural-ohio-teachers-j-d-vance-project-2025/