J.D. Vance Gets What He Came For in Ohio, No Elegy Necessary

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/us/politics/jd-vance-ohio-senate.html

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COLUMBUS, Ohio — It was nearly Wednesday morning, long after the beef tenderloin crostini started looking a little pale, when a young man in a red bow tie gave himself permission to dance a little. “Takin’ Care of Business” had, by then, played a half-dozen times, without the business taken care of.

Another Republican reveler chewed an unlit cigar, sighing a bit, before the Fox News graphic overhead gave the hotel ballroom the all-clear to celebrate in earnest. Someone draped himself in a campaign flag, cape-like, with chants of “J.D.” greeting the son of Appalachia and southwestern Ohio as he finally stepped into his next moment.

“Well,” J.D. Vance told the crowd, declaring himself “the last thing standing” between them and a rowdier party, “what can you even say after a night like tonight?”

They had some suggestions.

“Senator!” one guest shouted after he was done, pulling Mr. Vance in for a hug as he posed for photographs.

“As good as it gets,” another said of the evening.

“Okay,” a woman exulted. “I’m going to go smoke a cigarette.”

So much on Tuesday did not go as Republicans had hoped. The red wave sputtered. The mega-upsets in deep blue states never came.

But this room, at least, was the picture of a plan working, a gambit rewarded — a triumph of ambition and recalibration and a tidy encapsulation of the political incentives that power a certain kind of Republican lawmaker to Washington.

Mr. Vance, the best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy” memoirist and venture capitalist who once described Donald J. Trump as “cultural heroin,” wanted to be a senator and reconsidered his stance. Mr. Trump, who delights in little more than bringing onetime critics to heel, endorsed Mr. Vance in time to ensure the candidate’s Republican primary win in the spring. The rest was cold math in a state the former president twice carried by eight points, delivering Mr. Vance a comfortable victory over Representative Tim Ryan on Tuesday night.

“As we were walking down here, my aunt said to my uncle, ‘Aren’t you glad that he won? That would have been a terrible ride home,’” Mr. Vance joked to attendees. “That’s what we’re thinking here in the Vance family.”

As such, even as some bleary-eyed supporters tumbled happily into downtown Columbus early Wednesday morning, the proceedings were often more workmanlike than entirely rollicking.

“It’s called a victory party every election,” Senator Rob Portman, whom Mr. Vance will succeed, said from the microphone early in the night, winding to an underwhelming punchline: “Tonight, it will be very well named.”

Despite Mr. Ryan’s persistent polling strength as the campaign’s end neared, Mr. Vance’s task was always going to be far simpler: Convince a red state to do its red thing in what was supposed to be a red year.

“What the hell am I doing here?” Mr. Trump asked Mr. Vance performatively at a rally outside Dayton on Monday, suggesting the race was already in hand. “Goodnight, everybody. We can make this one real short, J.D.” (He kept at it for another 96 minutes.)

It was a fitting coda — the Trump cameo, the wandering focus, the Republican success regardless. Much of this contest had turned on questions of authenticity and independence: Who exuded more essential Ohio-ness? Who owed a greater debt to oft-reviled leaders of their national parties?

Supporters of Mr. Ryan — who at times seemed to campaign exclusively in Ohio State Buckeyes game-day apparel, with a locally brewed beer in hand — insisted the answers were clear: He was a high-school football star from the Mahoning Valley, reared amid the steel crisis. His most prominent turn as a congressman was probably running against Nancy Pelosi for House Democratic leader. (Republicans pointed out, less conveniently, that Mr. Ryan’s voting record during the Biden presidency was fully in line with the Democratic agenda.)

Mr. Vance was a local-made-good as an author, Democrats conceded, but what about the rest? The Silicon Valley arc alongside Peter Thiel, the right-wing tech billionaire? The whiplashing fealty to Mr. Trump?

Mr. Ryan got off the race’s most memorable debate zinger, invoking Mr. Trump’s observation that Mr. Vance had been “kissing my ass” to win favor. “Ohio needs an ass-kicker,” Mr. Ryan said, “not an ass-kisser.”

Ohio was unmoved. And the bipartisan consensus after the vote was unsparing: It probably never mattered much what Mr. Ryan said about anything, even if he often said it well.

“Tim was a better candidate,” said Aaron Pickrell, a veteran Democratic operative in the state, attributing the final result to a Republican combination of “Vance Trumpism” and “DeWine pragmatism.” (That would be Gov. Mike DeWine, a more moderate figure who coasted to re-election on Tuesday while running well ahead of Mr. Vance.)

“Helluva candidate,” Michael Hartley, a longtime Republican strategist in the state, said of Mr. Ryan, calling Ohio “a solid red state now.”

“Tim Ryan is a quality candidate,” a Fox News commentator, Ben Domenech, said on the network’s broadcast, earning jeers at the watch party.

After a campaign often marked by mutual viciousness in the closing weeks, even Mr. Vance seemed to count himself eventually among Mr. Ryan’s admirers, to a point. Concession calls (and the attendant winning) tend to soften a person.

“The guy loves the state of Ohio,” Mr. Vance said of his opponent, to tepid applause. “I appreciate the gracious phone call, appreciate the effort that his campaign put in.”

As he spoke, his shoulders dropped a bit, the semi-stiffness that accompanied some past stump speeches seeming to leave his body, at least temporarily. Supporters held their phones aloft to record it.

Mr. Vance closed with a word about the grandmother who raised him, his tenacious “Mamaw,” made famous in “Hillbilly Elegy.”

“We joked that if we could wheel her up here today, she would drop probably about five F-bombs on national TV,” Mr. Vance said.

He thanked his family, his staff, the Republicans who shared the ballot with him. He pledged to never forget where he came from.

“I saw a different side of him,” a local Republican, Drake Ross, said. “Like, ‘phew.’”

But come to think of it, a few guests noticed afterward — filing out of a lobby suffused with MAGA-wear — there was one man he neglected to mention.