MIDDLETOWN, Ohio — Sen. JD Vance was not happy when President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign, throwing the Democratic Party’s ticket into turmoil and robbing him of a moment he was looking forward to: debating Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I was told I was going to debate Kamala Harris,” Vance said here Monday during his first solo event as former President Donald Trump’s running mate. “And now President Trump is going to get to debate her? I’m kind of pissed off about that, if I’m being honest with you.”
The event, held at the high school Vance graduated from in 2003, came a day after Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Biden, who was under pressure to step aside amid questions about his fitness for office and ability to run a winning campaign, endorsed Harris to replace him as the Democratic nominee. Much of the party’s establishment has followed suit — a development that Vance cast in his remarks as an affront to democracy.
“Elite Democrats,” Vance said, “got in a smoke-filled room and decided to throw Joe Biden overboard. That is not how it works. That is the threat to democracy, not the Republican Party.”
A moment later, Vance made a pitch to Democrats who might not be happy with their choices.
“You are welcome in the Republican Party, where we think we should persuade voters and not lie to voters,” he said. “Come on in, the water’s warm.”
Vance, whose remarks were filled with expressions of gratitude to his hometown, also criticized Harris, accusing her of not sounding grateful enough when she speaks.
“Every country — just like every family, certainly mine — has its pockmarks, right? Not everything’s perfect,” said Vance, who wrote about his family’s struggles in his 2016 book, “Hillbilly Elegy.” “But if you want to lead this country, you should feel grateful for it. You should feel a sense of gratitude, and I never hear that gratitude come through when I listen to Kamala Harris.”
At his second campaign event of the day, in Radford, Virginia, Vance went after Harris harder than he did in Ohio, calling her a "million times worse" than Biden.
“The Biden record is the Kamala Harris record. And given what we know about Joe Biden, Kamala Harris probably did a lot more than Joe Biden does,” Vance added.
Trump’s campaign is relying on Vance’s upbringing in the industrial Midwest to be a selling point in three key states that Biden flipped in 2020 — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Vance framed his Ohio speech Monday, as he did his address accepting the vice presidential nomination at last week’s Republican National Convention, around working-class voters in places like Middletown.
Vance railed against trade deals that made it easier for corporations to move jobs to other countries and emphasized Trump’s long-standing opposition to such pacts. He also leaned into culture war issues, warning of “indoctrination” in public education and accusing Democrats of believing that “it’s racist to do” or believe “anything.”
“I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today — I’m sure they’re gonna call that racist, too,” Vance said in Ohio, drawing laughs from the audience and adding: “I love you guys.”
But the afternoon’s most heated rhetoric came from a local lawmaker, state Sen. George Lang, who warned of a “civil war” if Trump and Vance lose the election this fall.
“I believe wholeheartedly: Donald Trump and Butler County’s JD Vance are the last chance to save our country politically,” Lang said at the event’s opening program. “I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country, and it will be saved. It’s the greatest experiment in the history of mankind.”
Lang later said he regretted his language, which was at odds with stated claims by some Republicans that the political rhetoric should be toned down after the attempted assassination of Trump.
“Remarks I made earlier today at a rally at a rally in Middletown do not accurately reflect my views,” Lang said on X. “I regret the divisive remarks I made in the excitement of the moment on stage.”
He said that after the assassination attempt he should have been more mindful of his language.
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A campaign official told NBC News that more than 1,000 people were inside the Middletown High School auditorium for the speech, with a fire marshal having to close down the entrance. About 1,000 more were left outside; Vance went out to greet them before he spoke.
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Vance wrote about his hometown in his memoir, which covered his grandparents’ migration from the hills of eastern Kentucky to the factory towns of southwest Ohio and his mother’s drug addiction. In the book, Vance describes the people he grew up around in both admiring and critical terms. In his words, Middletown was appropriately named.
“As kids, we joked that our hometown was so generic that they didn’t even bother to give it a real name: It’s in the middle of Cincinnati and Dayton, and it’s a town, so here we are,” Vance wrote. “Middletown is generic in other ways. It exemplified the economic expansion of the manufacturing-based Rust Belt town. Socioeconomically, it is largely working-class.”
In his speech Monday, Vance was high on nostalgia.
“I might make the Secret Service take me to Central Pastry afterwards,” he said.
Someone in the crowd tried to correct him, shouting out a different bakery: “Milton’s!”
Vance affirmed his appreciation for Milton’s, too.
“I skipped lunch, so my mind’s on donuts here,” he said.
The mix of Trump die-hards and locals loyal to Vance, or at least curious about the hometown boy chosen for the GOP ticket, lined up hours in advance. Their queue snaked past the high school and the neighboring middle school, nearly reaching the college campus a half-mile away.
“I know what the kids here deal with,” Jenny King, a teacher at the middle school, said as she waited to get inside. “And I think it’s fantastic to be able to say that, you know, he went through here and, you know, we’re here to support.”
“I can look back at yearbooks and say I knew him when, which is kind of cool,” King, 53, added. “I never had him in class. But, you know, it is really neat to be able to say that … Middletown City Schools, you know, he’s a product of it.”
Mike Smith, a lifelong Middletown resident, said he was a fan of Vance’s book and the Netflix movie adapted from it.
“Never been to one of these things before,” Smith, 68, said as he waited in line. “Just kind of curious. … It’s kind of a rags-to-riches kind of thing and everything.”
Not everyone in the crowd was starstruck. Steve Albert, a retiree from nearby Cincinnati, where Vance now lives, said he's voting for the Democratic ticket “but wanted to come see the circus.”
“I think I’d be concerned about how he’s flip-flopped about his positions and how he’s flip-flopped about his support for Trump,” said Albert, 67, referring to Vance’s past criticism of Trump. “But someone might label him [an] opportunist.”
