CINCINNATI — When J.D. Vance walked into his surgical technology class at Great Oaks Vocational Campuses, engineering students were preparing for their final exams. But it turned out to be the perfect moment. Vance had intended to merely observe the class, but when he noticed that a student was concerned about a classmate drawing her blood, the Republican senator from Ohio casually took off his jacket and offered to take her place. When there was no objection from teacher or students, he sat down, rolled up his sleeves and smiled.
To the visibly nervous student who was about to insert a needle into his arm, Vance said quietly, “Don’t be nervous. If you have to do it again, I don’t mind. I’m here for you until you get it right.”
The student managed to do it on the first stab.
The instructor looked at Vance with a wide smile. “Well, I didn’t expect to see that from you today.”
Confusing expectations become something of a habit for Vance.
Eight months after winning Ohio’s U.S. Senate seat over Democrat Tim Ryan and a year after winning one of the wildest primary elections in Buckeye State history, with both races having former President Donald Trump’s hands on them, Vance is not one to breathe fire the press predicted this would be the case. Nor, of course, is his gentle and cunning predecessor, former senator Rob Portman.
Vance does well without fitting any of these molds.
Sitting comfortably in a clear conference room at a high school on Cincinnati’s west side, Vance had just spent most of Friday morning touring the campus of Diamond Oaks Technical School. During the two-hour visit, he entered each classroom and watched 11th and 12th grade students show off their skills, talking to them about what they planned to do with the certificates they were earning in carpentry, graphic design, auto mechanics, coding, cosmetology and welding after graduation.
When Vance arrived earlier in the day and walked over to greet the principal, he got his own surprise.
“I went to shake his hand and I was like, ‘He looks familiar,’ and then I realized, oh my God, it’s Mr. Rush, my high school teacher. I hugged him tightly. And it was just nice to walk around with him and see him as a principal here,” he said.
The night before his visit here, he was in Oxon Hill, Maryland, for a leadership summit marking the 50th anniversary of the Heritage Foundation, warning that the greatest threat facing America is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan while President Joe Biden sends U.S. foreign aid to Ukraine .
The Middletown-born author of the memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” was seen as a translator for Rust Belt populists, but Vance’s Trumpist turn convinced many of his current colleagues that he was simply part of the problem. (Vance has already endorsed Trump for the 2024 nomination.)
Perhaps that is why Vance spent more than 200 days in the Upper House trying to find common ground. “I get on quite well with Chris Murphy. Smart guy, way to the left of me, but we have some areas of agreement and I think we can work together,” said the Democratic junior senator from Connecticut, whom diplomatic candidate Stephanie Sullivan Vance blocked in July.
Sometimes events force a type of cooperation that might not come naturally. Vance’s first month in office was something of a baptism by fire in having to respond to the disastrous Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine and the subsequent controlled toxic burns. Within days, both he and fellow Ohio senator, Democrat Sherrod Brown, formed an unlikely duo in both Columbiana County and Congress, trying to get to the bottom of what happened.
“Then I think working on rail safety in a way that could open up both rail lines and get both Democrats and Republicans to actually raise the issue” enabled everyone involved to put their egos aside, Vance suggested. “It’s pure practicality. You have to do something. How to do something? You have to work with someone. Well, I think I’ll go work with that person.”
The resulting rail legislation, the Railroad Safety Act of 2023, of which Vance was an original co-sponsor, was passed by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in May. It was so bipartisan that both Trump and Biden gave it their full support.
For Vance, it was personal. “What happened in East Palestine affected people I care about. And you just had to do it,” he said.
A year ago, when Vance won the Republican primary, the perception was that he was riding a wave of political resentment. But the reason he remains an enigma to the press and his colleagues is that he is not driven by any one thing. There is no doubt that he is a leading participant in the conservative populist rebellion against “the system”. It’s also clear that his Appalachian roots, military service in the Marine Corps, Yale education, and early career in Silicon Valley play essential and sometimes contradictory roles in his worldview. When he talks about Ukraine, for example, he becomes frustrated by the difficulty many policymakers have in imagining what life in uniform is like.
Vance remains a conservative populist and a staunch Trump supporter. But he also introduced legislation with Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Mark Kelly of Arizona.
Vance smiles at the thought of not fitting into someone else’s caricature and sets off to catch up with his senior high school teacher.
