GOTTA GO FULL DEPAPE, SON (profanity alert):

After Elegy was published, Vance--whose day job was in San Francisco at the time--announced he'd be moving back to Ohio. When he resurfaced last year as a competitor in the state's overcrowded Republican primary, he was running with a nastier crowd. He appeared on Tucker Carlson's show, did an interview with 2020 election conspiracy theorist Dinesh D'Souza, and did a campaign appearance with Marjorie Taylor Greene. He complained online that eBay had stopped letting users buy Dr. Seuss books that included racist caricatures, suggested that QAnon believers might be right that many celebrities and politicians are pedophiles, and signed a pledge to subpoena Anthony Fauci for "numerous and demonstrable lies."

Although he's stopped short of endorsing D'Souza or Greene's more florid theories about events in 2020, he nonetheless said that the 2020 election had been "stolen" from Trump, said that he had been wrong to believe Trump would be a poor president, and flew to Mar-a-Lago to successfully seek the big man's endorsement. He suggested in a tweet that some feminists believe "it's bad for women to become mothers" but "liberating" for them "to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs." He defended comments he'd made in 2021 about the potential upside, for one's children, of sticking out an abusive marriage.

Maybe it was really a simple story: Having become unsatisfied with the life of a thought leader, Vance adopted the MAGA personality to pander to a different audience and get his hands on some real power.

It was probably the right strategy for winning the primary in Ohio, at least. I spoke to the Columbus Dispatch's longtime political columnist, Darrel Rowland, about the state's recent history not long after he announced that his newspaper job had been cut after 31 years. He reminded me that Ohio had been "the quintessential bellwether state for decades." (Everyone else from Ohio will also tell you this.) It cast its electoral votes for the winning presidential candidate in every election held between 1900 and 2016 besides two. Those two were 1944, when the state's lieutenant governor was on the Republican ticket running against FDR, and 1960, when Nixon carried the day.

For years, Ohio was balanced, roughly speaking, between urban and/or union Democrats, suburban chamber of commerce types, and conservative farm voters. This did not necessarily mean that every politician and person in the state was an even-tempered centrist--have fun on Jim Traficant's Wikipedia page--but it tended to mean that "blue-collar" moderate Dems and avuncular, fiscally oriented Republicans won statewide. Goings-on in the state capital of Columbus usually accorded with the latter group's interests. There were some hard-right conservatives in the legislature--the so-called Caveman Caucus--but, in Rowland's telling, they were generally treated with endearment "because they had no power." He said onetime state representative and senator Jim Jordan, a member of that caucus, was known to reporters as "one of the nice ones."

This was still the state of affairs in 2012, when Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney in Ohio by 3 points, just barely underperforming the national margin. But by 2020, the state was 12 points redder than the country as a whole. The cavemen, and cavewomen, had taken over. Ohio is holding its current elections using gerrymandered maps that the state's own Supreme Court has ruled are illegal under the terms of a voter-passed referendum, and it passed a law which made all abortion illegal once the Dobbs decision went into effect (though that one is currently blocked in the courts). One state senator asked during a COVID hearing in 2020 whether "the colored population do not wash their hands as well as other groups," while a state rep cited the Holocaust as the kind of "divisive concept" that should be taught, in schools, from multiple points of view. Jordan was the House of Representatives' most vocal promoter of the effort to challenge election results on Jan. 6. Not so nice!

I asked Rowland if he knew how such a hostile takeover happened so quickly, or whether there was anything he looked back on as a portent that he had missed. "I'm just gonna admit up front: I don't know," he said. "It's one of the questions that perplexes me." He seemed shell-shocked to have realized that individuals this extreme had been circulating in his midst this entire time.

There are high-level explanations for what happened. One is the depopulation of cities and towns across the state: Even small pockets of urban density in Ohio, towns with names like Portsmouth and Lorain, still skew Democratic, but those pockets have been shrinking for years. In July, the Census Bureau released detailed information about migration patterns in state-by-state "commuting zones" among individuals born between 1984 and 1992, a subset that happens to include J.D. Vance. Fourteen of the 17 zones in Ohio lost population.

The other explanation frequently given is the rise of the tea party, whose "populist" anger about welfare queens and immigrants and political correctness was cashed in on, electorally, by Donald Trump, who swung the votes of white union members (and those from families that used to belong to unions) toward the Republican Party by campaigning on euphemism-free talk-radio griping. Nine heavily white counties in Ohio flipped from Obama to Trump.

Put simply, a lot of people in Ohio got angrier--or were able to connect their anger to their votes in a new way--at the same time that the electoral math was starting to disincentivize moderation. Vance's book observed the beginning of this phenomenon--and for all that it posited that there exists a white, working-class epidemic of personal laziness and self-indulgence, it's probably not entirely fair to say, as a recent piece by Sam Adler-Bell in the New Republic did, that Vance's career was built by ridiculing his people for the delight of coastal elites. A certain amount of his attention has always gone toward defending some of their tendencies.

In the book, for example, Vance describes the spread of birtherism and other conspiracy theories about Obama as an essentially coherent reaction to factors that "have nothing to do with skin color," such as distrust of the news media and the absence of collective economic opportunity. After joining the Marines, flying through Ohio State, and graduating from Yale Law School, Vance worked for right-wing venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who infamously wrote that he does not "believe freedom and democracy are compatible" in an essay that identified "welfare beneficiaries" and--I am not making this up--"women" as intractable obstacles to enlightened (i.e., business-friendly) public policy.

He is not a stranger to misanthropy, in other words, or the rationalization of extreme beliefs. But those impulses are more pronounced, and less tempered by the spirit of generosity, in his Senate campaign. His book describes Obama as a "brilliant" figure who "overcame adversity in his own right," and says conspiracy theories are ultimately a destructive response to the absence of community. His website platform, by contrast, asserts that Democratic leaders believe America is "an evil and racist country," blows a dog whistle toward individuals who "chose to take a knee as radicals ransacked our cities," and makes six pejorative mentions of the "Chinese."

This rhetoric has currency in Republican politics, but it hasn't been sufficient for Vance to achieve a normal level of popularity for a Republican in this election cycle. 

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