MIDDLETOWN, Ohio — Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) put Middletown on the map with his bestselling memoir, and now his hometown is at the forefront of the 2024 presidential election.
While Republican supporters are regaling him as a hometown hero who will bring economic prosperity back to the region, Democrats both in and out of the city feel the spotlight, and Vance’s rhetoric opens up wounds about how the blue-collar town is misunderstood or inaccurately portrayed.
Prior to Vance ascending to the national ticket, the junior senator from Ohio thrust Middletown into the spotlight thanks to his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and the subsequent Netflix movie.
With only a quarter of his first term complete, Vance and his running mate, former President Donald Trump, are looking to appeal to working-class voters and those suffering under the high cost of living to become the next White House administration.
In Middletown, a city of about 51,000 people between Cincinnati and Dayton, Republicans are fired up about the Ohioan being selected for vice presidential nominee — even those who didn’t know him personally before Trump chose him from his short list of possibilities.
Donald Westman and Todd Doyle, Middletown residents and Butler County GOP volunteers, said voter enthusiasm in their county for the 2024 election is growing significantly with Vance’s name on the ballot.
“The major part of this community, we’re very proud that we have J.D. Vance, a hometown boy from Middletown, Ohio,” Doyle, who was born and raised in Middletown, said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “His book has become a bestseller. He’s telling an American story that most people in this community, it resonates with.”
Westman, who is a native of Middletown but has lived in Franklin, Ohio, for eight years, is on his third election volunteering for the Butler County Republican Party. He said people in Middletown are “very, very proud” of Vance and in favor of what he and Trump are promising.
“He is the embodiment of the American dream,” Westman said of Vance. “And the American dream was almost dead. And another term with these knuckleheads and the American dream will be dead.”
Republicans see Vance’s Middletown upbringing as essential to gaining voters
Since being chosen as Trump’s running mate, Vance said he’s on a mission to help “forgotten communities” like Middletown and that he would “never forget where I came from.” His name appears on various yard signs beneath Trump’s across Butler County, which Trump won by over 20 points in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.
“He knows what a lot of these politicians don’t know, what it’s like to be poor,” Westman said. “He does. He’ll never forget.”
In his book, Vance described how Middletown, a factory town, became “little more than a relic of American industrial glory” due to the steel plants closing down and cutting jobs.
He graduated from Middletown High School in 2003 and, in July, returned to that high school to hold a homecoming rally. He appealed directly to working voters, using his small-town upbringing to press the GOP ticket’s populist economic agenda. Vance spoke to the decline of manufacturing jobs and American occupation — a point supporters were pleased to hear from a candidate.
“Coming from our hometown, he knows when he tells the public what it was like to grow up here in this town,” Doyle said. “This is like ground zero for NAFTA.”
Ohio Republican strategist Matt Dole told the Washington Examiner that Middletown is an illustration for much of the Rust Belt, a section of the country long regarded as the heartland of United States manufacturing, steelmaking, and coal production that faced dramatic industrial decline beginning in the mid-1900s.
By the 1990s, Ohio lost over 270,000 manufacturing jobs, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics in part because of the North American Free Trade Association coming into full swing. The Armco steel plant, sitting east of downtown Middletown and one of the town’s oldest companies, provided thousands of jobs for Middletown residents, including Vance’s grandfather, per the National News.
However, by 1983, the plant was reporting millions of dollars in losses, and jobs began to disappear.
Doyle said Trump was the first presidential candidate he heard talk about the loss of jobs and production to overseas factories.
“I personally resonated with Trump over that, because I kept waiting, ‘When is some politician going to call out all the jobs being sold out overseas?’ Donald Trump did it, and so for me, J.D., specifically, I think they make a great team,” Doyle said.
The steel plant, acquired by Cleveland-Cliffs in 2020, is bouncing back. The company plans to invest more than $500 million in federal grants and $1.3 billion in its own funds over five years to upgrade the Middletown plant, per Journal-News.
Since Trump arrived on the scene, many working-class voters have switched from being longtime Democrats to Republicans because, as Westman and Doyle noted, they are suffering dramatically from high grocery costs and fewer job opportunities.
“Everybody’s angry,” Westman said. “They’re tired of what’s going on in this country. I mean, they’re tired. They’ve had enough.”
Trump won Ohio by roughly 8 points in 2016 and 2020, with strategists expecting him to sweep the Buckeye State by double digits this November. So, Dole said, Trump doesn’t need Vance to win the state, but Republicans may need Vance to win down-ballot races. Republican Bernie Moreno is seeking to defeat Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), who has courted working-class and blue-collar voters over his time in office.
“Donald Trump was going to win Ohio with or without J.D. Vance,” Dole said. “But I think what J.D. Vance brings to the ticket is an ability to speak to working people in a way that Democrats have traditionally. … Vance can speak to those people who have come into that coalition.”
Democrats push back against Vance’s Middletown narrative
Not all Middletown residents approve of Vance invoking Middletown in his book or on the campaign trail.
Heather Gibson, independent, of Middletown, who has owned and operated a small business in town for almost 10 years, told the Washington Examiner in an interview that she does not think Vance has brought a “good light” to Middletown and Hillbilly Elegy was a “terrible representation” of the hometown she shares with the GOP vice president nominee.
Gibson’s father worked at the Armco steel plant, she said, but her upbringing was not the same as Vance’s, attributing it to her father’s ability to raise five children on a good job. Vance’s story in Hillbilly Elegy largely focused on his mother’s addiction to opioids and how that impacted his childhood.
“I’ve never discounted his story. Um, it was his story to tell, you know, but it turned into a story of a city, and I think that’s where you have the love-hate relationship with him here,” Gibson said.
Luke Schroeder, Vance’s campaign spokesman, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner that the senator has “always offered his and his family’s honest perspective, and while many share that perspective, some do not.”
“That’s the nature of publishing your life story,” Schroeder said.
Some remnants of the Middletown described in Hillbilly Elegy, a “hub of misery,” remains: rundown strip malls, vacant storefronts, potholes in the streets, with Trump and Vance signs the only bright color on the lawns of older homes and crumbling apartments.
However, Gibson’s coffee shop sits in a quaint downtown that has boutiques, restaurants, a bank, and patrons milling about sporting both Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz paraphernalia. Some stores, such as Gibson’s, offer information on local Democratic candidates and display LGBT flags and “coexist” stickers.
Dole acknowledged that Middletown is “growing in prosperity” compared to the Middletown Vance described in his book, but that the contrast is a positive for the senator’s campaign.
“I think in that way, it can be seen as sort of a success story, at least in the making,” Dole said. “I don’t think people of Middletown are sort of rolling their eyes thinking, ‘Oh, here we go again.’ I don’t think that exists. I also don’t know that the residents of Middletown are looking for extra attention.”
Gibson said while the community has struggled, “Middletown, at its heart, is a community.”
“It’s a community that cares for one another. It’s a close-knit community, even if you don’t know somebody, you don’t need to for them to reach out a hand and help you,” the small business owner said.
Vance drew ire from Democrats and some Republicans after he and Trump made comments that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating neighbors’ pets as part of the larger talking points Republicans make related to the southern border crisis. Springfield Mayor Rob Rue, as well as Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH), have denied the claims perpetuated by the Republican presidential ticket.
Gibson, who owns the Triple Moon Coffee Company in the heart of Middletown’s downtown area, called the city a “diverse community.”
“In my neighborhood alone, I’ve got a guy that lives across the street from me that’s from Africa,” Gibson said. “Down the street, I have a woman that is from Puerto Rico. Across the road, a couple houses down, I have Mexicans.”
“So wherever he got his bigotry and his rhetoric, that came after he left here because he did not get that from Middletown,” Gibson said of Vance.
Vance has doubled down on his remarks in interviews and during the vice presidential debate. Speaking to the New York Times podcaster Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Vance said it is “disgraceful that American leaders pretend they care about these migrants more than they care about the people they took an oath of office to actually look after.”
Kathy Wyenandt, chairwoman of the Butler County Democrats, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner that Vance’s “extreme” views are out of touch with the rest of the state and he does not represent “Middletown, Butler County, or even Ohio.”
“He might be ‘from’ Middletown, but he hasn’t done anything for the people of Middletown except throw them under the bus for his own profit and name elevation,” Wyenandt said.
How voters beyond Middletown’s borders see the Vance-Trump ticket
GOP voters outside of Middletown touted Vance and Trump’s economic plans, as well as their promises to stop the influx of illegal immigrants at the southern border. While not having a personal connection to Middletown, Danielle Carr, a Republican from Columbus, said the Republican ticket is taking a “nice, hard look at small communities.”
“Seeing how different things are and what kind of impact they’re creating, and I appreciate that,” Carr said.
Many Democratic voters are unhappy with Vance’s portrayal of the state of Ohio.
“You know, Ohio is a lot bigger than some of these small towns that people claim — that they have these claims to fame for. I don’t think the people in J.D. Vance’s county really acknowledge him as their people, either,” said Cristina De los Santos, a Democrat from Columbus.
“For me, it just kind of seems like he is trying to portray Ohio citizens as uneducated and not proactive in the decisions that they make and rely so heavily on the government, and that’s just not the case,” De los Santos added. “We’re a lot bigger than some of the small towns in between.”
Not all Republicans are motivated to the ballot box by the Ohio senator’s presence. David Kulp, a Republican from Columbus, said he was voting for the Trump-Vance ticket, but not because of Vance.
“I don’t know that anybody’s voting for Trump because of J.D. Vance,” Kulp said. “Me, I’m voting for Trump because of what he did the last four years. And it’s just a shame to think of where we would be right now had he gotten into the second term.”
Kulp added that he, thankfully, has a good job, so he is not struggling economically like some of his fellow Ohioans. But he wants a return of Trump’s economic policies from his 2016 term.
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Vance spokesman Schroeder said, if elected, Trump and Vance “will unleash a golden age of American prosperity by fighting inflation, reshoring manufacturing jobs, cutting taxes for the working class, and putting an end to illegal immigration.
“Every citizen across our country deserves a chance at the American dream,” he added.
