With the presidential election coming up, it is important to know who you are voting for other than just the candidates for president. To people who do not pay that much attention to politics, you may or may not know of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). If I can be completely honest, it feels like J.D. Vance just popped up out of nowhere and decided to be a candidate for the vice presidency.
According to vance.senate.gov, Vance was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio. A town described as a once-flourishing American manufacturing town where Ohioans in the middle class could live content on single incomes. Over time, many of those adequate jobs disappeared, and Vance’s family suffered the effects along with many others. Vance went on to serve our nation in the Iraq War in the U.S. Marine Corps. He then graduated from Ohio State University and Yale Law School. He wrote a bestselling book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which was turned into a Netflix movie. He also started a business dedicated to growing jobs and opportunities in the American heartland. He is a U.S. senator of Ohio elected in 2022 and sworn into office on Jan. 3, 2023. Currently, he is running as the republican vice presidential candidate along with former President Donald Trump.
Whyy.org reported that Vance describes himself as “pro-life,” but stated on NBC’s Meet the Press that he supports the availability of the abortion pill mifepristone. During his 2022 Senate campaign, he expressed support for the issue of abortion to be left to the states.
Vance is one of the leading congressional Republican voices against U.S. aid to Ukraine. In a New York Times article, Vance wrote that he “remains opposed to virtually any proposal for the United States to continue funding this war.”
While running for the Senate in 2022, on the campaign trail Vance said that he thought the 2020 election was “stolen from Trump,” he told ABC News that he still questions the outcome of the 2020 election. On CNN, Vance downplayed the seriousness of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, questioning the fact that former Vice President Mike Pence’s life was at risk despite chants from the crowd that Pence should be hanged.
Vance described immigration as a disaster at the southern border and called for funding and constructing a border wall. Like Trump, Vance wants to “drain the swamp” and cleanse those who are out of touch with American policies. In a 2021 podcast, Vance recommended Trump to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people and then potentially defy the Supreme Court if the president was sued.”
If these key issues that he believes in are not raising questions, maybe the fact that he made up claims about Haitian immigrants will. In response to false claims about Haitian immigrants eating the pets of residents in Springfield, Ohio, Vance said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” This false story caused multiple bomb threats to be made in the Springfield community. Not to mention, after a tragic accident in which a school bus was hit by a Haitian immigrant in an SUV, killing a young boy on the bus, politicians Bernie Moreno, Chip Roy, Vance and Trump, used this against the Haitian immigrants. The father of the child has come out and asked that they would stop speaking his son’s name and use his death for political gain.
If this does not clearly demonstrate that Vance is similar to Trump, then I do not know what will. Vance lies and twists words and situations in order to gain popularity within his party and the media. At the start of his political career, Vance criticized Trump. The fact that he changed his initial views to gain Trump’s support just in time for his senate election explains this behavior.
It is also confusing to me how Vance, who was once born in a town where the middle class could live content on a single income, is running with Trump’s tax plan. Trump’s tax and spending plan “would increase primary deficits by $5.8 trillion over the next 10 years,” according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model. It estimates that low, middle and high-income households will benefit in the near-term, though future generations will inherit a larger federal debt. Brendan Duke reported that a typical family would, therefore, pay between $2,500 to $3,900 from Trump’s import taxes, depending on the precise tax rate between 10% and 20% that various countries’ goods could be taxed at. This suggests that the previously stable middle class will no longer exist. The prices of essential items such as groceries, gas and housing have already been increasing due to the policies implemented during Trump’s previous presidency. Just imagine how much worse it could become if he is reelected.
I firmly believe that Vance is not only a terrible candidate but a terrible human. Not only does Vance use certain situations for personal gain, but whether he wants to acknowledge it or not, according to Julianne Mcshane, he is connected to Project 2025. These reasons alone should be the reason why you should not vote for the Republican Party in this upcoming election.