--:-- Noelle King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. You are?
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: I'm Howard Wilkinson, Senior Political Analyst at 91.7 WVXU in Cincinnati.
--:-- Noelle King: I love it. How long have you been covering politics and analyzing politics in your neck of Ohio?
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: Well, all over Ohio, since 1974.
--:-- Noelle King: So J.D. Vance was negative 10 years old when you started. That would be correct. Most people would be negative, yes.
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: Coming up, James David Vance and the most bananas, that's a quote, Republican primary in America. What it tells us about a party that might be in disarray or might be finding its way.
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--:-- Noelle King: J.D. Vance is a figure of national importance these days, but he made his bones with a best-selling memoir about growing up in white working-class Ohio. It's one of those books that strives to explain a place and its people, which is why we wanted to talk to Howard Wilkinson, who knows the place and the people.
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: What did you think about the book?
--:-- Noelle King: I thought it was okay. I mean, to me, that's a subject that I'm very familiar with because I grew up in Dayton, Ohio, which had a very large Appalachian population. People would come up from Kentucky and Tennessee looking for jobs, looking for, you know, a better life.
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: So I understood the premise. And I also understood the kind of challenges that those folks face. You know, I thought it was good, but not great. I don't think it's a classic of American literature.
--:-- Noelle King: There was a sense that J.D. Vance was a kind of oracle who could explain Donald Trump's win to people who were quite surprised by it. Did you feel that in Ohio, or were you looking around the landscape in Ohio and saying, we don't need anyone to explain why Donald Trump won?
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: Of course Donald Trump won. People in Ohio certainly weren't looking at J.D. Vance's oracle of anything. They were looking at him as a guy who wrote a book who hadn't lived here in Ohio for most of his adult life.
--:-- Noelle King: He wrote a long piece in The Atlantic in 2016 on the subject, and it was one of those kind of, I am the Oracle, and I can tell you why these people are supporting Donald Trump.
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: Well, not that many people on the street in Ohio cities or in the farm towns or in the suburbs are reading those articles. And he just wasn't a factor.
--:-- Noelle King: What was going on in Ohio politics when this book came out?
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: Well, one of the things, I mean, Donald Trump was going on. There was a lot of division between the folks who supported Trump's candidacy and the people who were more of the mainstream of the party, the old traditional Republicans who dominated politics in the suburbs of the major cities.
--:-- Noelle King: And they supported John Kasich, the governor of Ohio.
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: And there was something going on. It was the same kind of thing that was going on in a lot of states where people were frustrated. They were thinking that they were not paid attention to in Washington. They were not paid attention to in Columbus.
--:-- Noelle King: And they were looking for someone who would work for them. They saw Trump as that person because he promised, I will make it better. I can make it better.
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: I'm not sure he did in the long run, but people were grasping for, basically grasping for straws and trying to find someone who they could pin their hopes to. And Donald Trump was available.
--:-- Noelle King: Right behind me now is the official call inside this room that Donald Trump has taken the 18 electoral votes from Ohio. You can hear the crowd, which is sort of reaching a crescendo here.
--:-- Noelle King: J.D. Vance, who'd been out in the Bay Area, decides that he's going to move back to his home state and wants to represent Ohio in the Senate. What was the reaction?
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: Nobody really talked about it much at the time. I mean, they hadn't seen him, and he was kind of this new figure on the scene.
--:-- Noelle King: They knew, you know, about Hillbilly Allergy, and they knew about the movie, and they knew a few things about him.
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: I think it was probably a surprise to most people that he really hadn't been an Ohio resident for a long, long time.
--:-- Noelle King: Once that set in, some people looked at him and said, okay, that's fine, it doesn't bother us. You know, he's an Ohio boy and he's just coming back home and he wants to help.
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: Others looked at him and said, no, he's a carpetbagger. If you're running for office, you do need to convince some people, or at least some percentage of people that you're not a carpetbagger that you really are of the region if you're not recently from the region.
--:-- Noelle King: How has J Vance gone about doing that? How has he convincing people he's not a carpetbagger?
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: I don't know that he is. I mean, what he does is he talks a lot about what he sees as the issues that are important to Ohio Republicans.
--:-- Noelle King: We're for middle class people being able to raise a family and do it on a single income. We're for the reindustrialization of this country. So we make more stuff in America. We build our own things.
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: We don't have to rely on the communist Chinese to make our pharmaceutical products.
--:-- Noelle King: You got to remember, I mean, now he's in a primary contest. You know, his audience is Ohio Republicans who, for the most part, voted for Trump.
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: And so he basically has kind of mimicked the Trump agenda.
--:-- Noelle King: Do you want to go down the pathway of an America first agenda? Or do you want to go down the pathway of doing the things that we were doing in the Republican Party 20 or so years ago, because I don't think it was a work.
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: Talking a lot about China and talking a lot about the border situation, you know, he very famously said he really didn't care what happened in Ukraine.
--:-- Noelle King: At the end of the day, we should not be doing a no-fly zone. We should not be getting involved in Russia at all. It's not our problem.
--:-- Howard Wilkinson: He was more interested in people flooding over the southern border, which didn't go over well with a lot of folks.
--:-- Noelle King: But, you know, others looked at it and said, yeah, that's right. And that's what Donald Trump says.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: I'm Ben Wallace-Wills, and I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker.
--:-- Noelle King: You are not a native Ohioan, but you spent some time there. Why did you want to watch this primary play out out of all the big primaries this year?
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: From a distance, in the way that it had been described in the national media, it was just the most bananas race in the country.
--:-- Noelle King: The left is trying to teach our kids there's over 50 genders, and as young as eight years old, you can just pick your gender.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: We're being lied to by everybody about Ukraine. Putin's lying to us. Zelensky's lying to us. The UN's lying to us. Our government's lying to us. Our intelligence community is lying to us.
--:-- Noelle King: At one candidate forum, two of the candidates almost got in a physical fight.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: You don't know squat. Two tours in Iraq. Don't tell me Ivan worked. Back off, buddy. You back off.
--:-- Noelle King: We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.
--:-- Noelle King: And let me say it very clear. I believe this election was stolen.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: All these people were competing for Donald Trump's endorsement. And in a deeper level, they were competing for the enthusiasms of his voters.
--:-- Noelle King: And that seemed to inspire just a very crude approach to politics.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: When I spoke to campaign operatives, what I heard was that this was a party and a race where people were trying to figure out what it might mean to be a working class party.
--:-- Noelle King: What it might mean to build the party around an appeal to working class voters.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: Where they had understood the legacy of Trump as, you know, a new kind of voter to appeal to.
--:-- Noelle King: And that part of what was going on in this race was a sort of working out of different theories, of different possibilities of how that might function.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: What were you seeing that made you think this is designed to appeal to working class people?
--:-- Noelle King: I think the sort of easiest, the kind of lowest common denominator reaction from consultants and candidates is that what Trump has given them is just license to be cruder.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: You know, it's license to say bad words. It's license to say nasty things about people who are different.
--:-- Noelle King: Then there is this layer that I think J.D. Vance, though he also has taken part in and sort of represents a second response, which is sort of to take seriously the part of Trumpism that views elites, globalization, the sort of neoliberal world as pretty corrupt and to make his own politics a kind of aggressive stance against that.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: J.D. Vance went to Yale Law School. How does he explain that one away, if he wants to suggest that he's a guy who is not representative of the elite?
--:-- Noelle King: Does anyone ask him about it?
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: Vance is good at some parts of politics and less good at others. He's pretty cerebral. He's pretty engaged in what ordinary voters are sort of asking and saying.
--:-- Noelle King: But, you know, the kind of basic blocking and tackling of campaigning where you explain or deflect obvious criticisms of you, he's not really there yet.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: I just want to know, how can you claim to represent Appalachia while at the same time being so fundamentally disconnected to it?
--:-- Noelle King: Not just Appalachia, but also people who attend a college like mine.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: Sure. Well, I don't think I'm so disconnected. I mean, I don't think Ohio Wesleyan, it's where you go to school, you go to school here.
--:-- Noelle King: I don't think it's that different from Ohio State, right? That's where I went to college.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: Look, man, I'm not going to hide from the fact that I've been very successful and I've been very lucky.
--:-- Noelle King: Why did Donald Trump endorse this man?
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: Trump wants to win. He wants to, you know, continue to demonstrate to this party that he is the essential figure because he is the man who can get candidates victories.
--:-- Noelle King: He is the man who can connect with the new base of the party.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: Vance, to me, was certainly the most impressive of the figures that I saw in Ohio.
--:-- Noelle King: He was the smartest. He had a view of what the Republican Party should be doing that went beyond this kind of pattern of crudity that we discussed.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: If you were going to put your finger on somebody and say, you know, I want to tip the scale for this guy, Vance seemed a pretty good bet because, you know, he would obviously owe the election to Trump.
--:-- Noelle King: He also probably would be a favorite to win in November over Tim Ryan, the Democrat who's running.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: So it seems sort of like a good match for somebody who wanted to win, wanted to be seen as a kingmaker.
--:-- Noelle King: He fits Trumpism in a way that the others don't.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: What did J.D. Vance represent before his political bid, do you think? And to whom?
--:-- Noelle King: I think J.D. Vance succeeded as a public intellectual because he evoked a kind of liberal guilt.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: I think he represented a vision of small-town America that had been degraded and betrayed by the forces of finance, industrial and economic change.
--:-- Noelle King: So my grandparents really were optimistic about the future. They thought that their children would have the American dream, even though my grandparents were born in poverty in eastern Kentucky coal country, but it hasn't really materialized.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: And you think about these areas that have really suffered economically, that have stagnant upward mobility, it a certain pessimism about what their own children and grandchildren will expect and I think that where the real bitterness comes from.
--:-- Noelle King: He presented himself as a witness to the ways in which that pressured rural America and the ways in which community and family fabrics might serve as a sort of counterweight or mechanism of repair.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: During the 2016 election, when we were all talking about deaths of despair and the opioid epidemic and trying to understand Trumpism and just the anger, of Republican voters in general.
--:-- Noelle King: I think he offered a pretty compelling thesis, which was there is something sort of fundamental that is behind all this.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: As he began to spot a political career for himself, he, you know, sort of fell into some of the patterns that have consumed much of the rest of the Republican Party and became a somewhat less distinct figure.
--:-- Noelle King: You wrote something in your piece. You noticed that J.D. Vance seems to use the word corruption now in a way that, according to you, corruption could be applied to almost any institution at all.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: Corruption is just a word he used a ton in following him around on the trail.
--:-- Noelle King: He spoke about the corruption of the Democratic Party. He spoke about the corruption of elites broadly, of tech companies, the corruption of the FBI.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: Five, six years ago, if you had told me, and I was naive, but if you had told me that the FBI would have spied on a U.S. presidential candidate, I would have said, no, that's crazy, that wouldn't happen.
--:-- Noelle King: What eventually persuaded him that he had been wrong about Donald Trump was that the corruption that Trump identified in Washington was more pronounced, more vivid, a bigger deal than he had thought.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: That corruption and the fact that so many powerful people tried to destroy the president made me realize, you know, there's something about this guy that's very important that's very meaningful and there's something there is something pretty dark in there.
--:-- Noelle King: Voters people who would come to the town hall would sort of you know sort of speculatively raise um different sort of stories from the news they'd talk about vaccination protocols and ask if there's something corrupt going on there they talk about hunter biden's laptop and ask if there's something corrupt going on there and vance would generally sort of say say yes yes i think there might be i think it's something it should be looked into.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: Because Nancy Pelosi, it turns out, is the world's best picker of stocks, right? She's gotten rich, picking stocks.
--:-- Noelle King: Well, you know, she's a genius, right? Somehow she's the Speaker of the House on one hand, and she's this great stock picker, and you realize it's not because of genius, it's because of corruption.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: This very general, what we would call populist, sort of message and orientation that there had been, that had been part of his presentation from the beginning had sharpened.
--:-- Noelle King: I think this charge of corruption is a much deeper, a more pervasive, and a sort of darker version.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: It's not a total transformation of who he is, but I do think that, you know, whether it's sincere, whether it's simply an adaptation to circumstance, he's talking in somewhat darker, somewhat more conspiratorial ways now.
--:-- Noelle King: There's a different palette. There's a different mood than maybe I had heard from him at least a couple of years earlier.
--:-- Noelle King: Why do you think it matters to so many people whether J.D. Vance has changed?
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: I think it matters because the Republican Party feels totally up for grabs right now.
--:-- Noelle King: It's not clear at all what the party is going to stand for in five years.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: And you can draw an argument right now that says basically nothing's changed. Still Mitch McConnell's party, still in the pocket, big business, still, you know, bristling social conservatism.
--:-- Noelle King: But you can also draw an argument that says, hey, wait a second, like maybe all of this hostility towards Facebook, towards China, towards Amazon, towards illegal immigrants, maybe that's not just a passing thing with Trump.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: Maybe that's not just specific to this one figure, but maybe that's going to be a central part of the Republican Party and its politics going forward.
--:-- Noelle King: This sort of orientational question of what the party stands for, of what it stands against, is really important and feels really up for grabs.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: And I think that Vance is somebody who is close to a lot of establishment figures in the Republican Party, you know, earlier on, who came out of Yale Law School, who has a fancy book agent, you know, who was sort of part of a very elite world.
--:-- Noelle King: I don't say that pejoratively either.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: But I do think it suggests that, like, people have thought this is a talent for quite a long time and sort of an interesting figure.
--:-- Noelle King: And so though he doesn't have the same profile as Trump, you know, though he's a less significant figure in the evolution of the Republican Party, in the same way that what Donald Trump actually cared about, didn't care about, in the same way that that mattered, who J.D. Vance is, those questions really matter, too.
--:-- Noelle King: In a party where the lines of right and moderate were more clearly drawn.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: I think that, you know, these questions of personal orientation, of change, of persona would matter less.
--:-- Noelle King: That's not the Republican Party that we're living with right now.
--:-- Ben Wallace-Wills: Right now, in both interesting and complicated ways, things are just up for grabs.
--:-- Noelle King: Today's show was produced by Victoria Chamberlain, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Afim Shapiro.
--:-- Noelle King: I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.
