Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, held two rallies on Monday, including one at his old high school in his hometown, for his first solo campaign events since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him atop the Democratic ticket.
While Harris has not officially earned the nomination, she has been endorsed by scores of Democratic lawmakers, power players and convention delegates as no major challenger to her ascension has emerged. Vance largely treated her as the likely nominee, though he said her name fewer times than he said Biden’s in both speeches.
“I was told I was going to get to debate Kamala Harris and now President Trump’s going to debate her?” Vance said in Middletown, Ohio. “I’m kind of pissed off about that, if I’m being honest with you.”
Vance also slammed the decision by Biden to bow out of the race, calling the process that led Democrats to this point “a threat to democracy.”
“The idea of selecting the Democrat Party's nominee because [Democratic megadonor] George Soros and Barack Obama and a couple of elite Democrats got in a smoke filled room and decided to throw Joe Biden overboard. That is not how it works. That is a threat to democracy,” Vance said, about 30 minutes into his Ohio speech. “You cannot for three and a half years take a guy who clearly didn't have the mental capacity to do the job. Kamala Harris lied about it. My Senate Democratic colleagues lied about it. The media lied about it.”
And later in the day in a speech at Virginia’s Radford University, Vance alluded to calls for Biden to resign from top Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson.
“Can anybody just admit that if Joe Biden is not fit to run for president, he ain't fit to serve as president of the United States either?” he said. “And if Kamala Harris is too blind or too corrupt to admit to the American people that Joe Biden should have never been in there, she's not fit to serve either. We're going to get them both out of there.”
Biden decided to drop out after a combination of public and private pressure from members of his own party amid questions over his age and ability to effectively campaign against former President Donald Trump. Obama publicly restated his commitment to Biden after his disastrous debate performance last month and Soros’ son, Alex — who now oversees his 93-year-old father’s operations — continued to publicly support Biden until he made his decision on Friday.
The elder Soros, who is Jewish and a Holocaust survivor, is a frequent target of right-wing conspiracy theories and antisemitic attacks.
In Virginia, Vance pinned Harris as “even more extreme than Biden” on immigration and blamed her for the flow of migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border, arguing she encourages illegal immigration despite her famously being tasked by Biden with telling Latin American migrants “don’t come.”
Vance also criticized Harris for talking about “the history of this country, not with appreciation, but with condemnation,” arguing the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants wasn’t grateful enough.
“Look, of course, every country, just like every family, certainly mine, has its pockmarks, right? Not everything's perfect. It's never going to be,” Vance said in Ohio. “But you, if you want to lead this country, you should feel grateful for it. You should feel a sense of gratitude. And I never hear that gratitude come through when I listen to Kamala Harris.”
“What the hell have you done other than to collect a government check for the past 20 years?” he asked in Virginia later in the day.
Prior to Vance speaking in his hometown, a handful of Ohio Republicans addressed the crowd, including Senate candidate Bernie Moreno and Ohio state Sen. George Lang. Lang, who represents Vance’s hometown, said “I believe wholeheartedly Donald Trump and Butler County's JD Vance are the last chance to save our country politically. I'm afraid if we lose this one, it's going to take a civil war to save the country.”
The Ohio lawmaker said on social media later that “remarks I made earlier today at a rally in Middletown do not accurately reflect my views. I regret the divisive remarks I made in the excitement of the moment on stage."
In a text message to Spectrum News, Lang said he did not speak to Trump campaign officials before or after his speech regarding his "civil war" comment. He did not respond to additional questions.
“Donald Trump and JD Vance are running a campaign openly sowing hatred and promising revenge against their political opponents. It’s a feature, not a bug, of their campaign and message to the American people. That’s why a Republican official was empowered to predict a civil war while introducing these candidates," Harris campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement. “Donald Trump and JD Vance should denounce George Lang’s calls for violence and apologize for platforming this kind of violence.”
The Trump-Vance campaign did not respond to a request for comment. When Vance took the stage minutes later, he thanked each Republican politician who spoke before him by name except for Lang.
“We've got a great slate of state and local officials who are ready to make this state in this country great again. God bless you guys. God bless you for your service, and thank you for stepping up,” Vance said.
Vance used his appearance in the town he was raised in and at the high school he graduated from in 2003 to discuss his family history and path to the Senate, histories he has shaped his public persona around, including in his bestselling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”
A CNN poll conducted in late June found the majority of registered voters had never heard of Vance or had no opinion of him. Just 11% of registered voters said they had a favorable opinion of Vance and 18% had an unfavorable one, according to the poll. Vance has served in the Senate for less than two years.
Middletown, which sits between Cincinnati and Dayton, is considered to be part of the Rust Belt. Using it as the location for his first solo event as the vice presidential nominee not only allowed Vance to lean into his biography, but it gives the campaign a chance to establish a fresh groundswell in a former swing state that has been trending Republican and where they are trying to take out the last remaining statewide Democrat, Sen. Sherrod Brown, in November.
Vance’s event at Radford University was in a part of western Virginia that is considered a part of the Appalachia region, where he claims heritage from. There he talked about drug overdoses and addiction that have ravaged the region, including in reference to his mother, who is at the center of his memoir and who he announced at the Republican National Convention was 10 years sober.
“But I got to be honest with you, if the same poison that's coming across the border now was coming across the border 20 years ago, I don't know that I would have gotten a second chance with my mother,” Vance said. “And there are a lot of families all across this country who are not getting second chances with their loved ones because the cartels are bringing poison across this country at a level we have never seen. We have got to shut that border down.”
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a possible contender to be Harris’ running mate, slammed Vance for the way he talks about Appalachia in an interview on Monday morning.
“I want the American people to know what a Kentuckian is and what they look like,” Beshear said. “Because let me just tell you that JD Vance ain’t from here.”
Speaking to reporters on his campaign plane, dubbed “Trump Force Two,” en route to Virginia from Ohio, Vance pushed back on his potential rival for the vice presidency and pointed out Beshear is the son of a former Kentucky governor.
Eastern Kentucky, where he spent chunks of his childhood, “will always have a special place in my heart,” Vance said, according to Politico. “It’s very weird to have a guy whose first job was at his dad’s law firm and who inherited the governorship from his father criticize my origin story.”
In Middletown, Vance recounted a story about a high school math teacher who dismissed a bomb threat because he knew the kid who made the threat wasn’t “smart enough to make a bomb.” He talked of his grandma “Mamaw” once helping out a local girl who came from an abusive home and who came from parts of Kentucky “where a woman isn’t fully dressed without her gun.”
“I love every one of you, and I love this town, and I'm so grateful to have been formed by it, because I wouldn't be who I was without it,” Vance said. “My life wasn't all that different from a lot of people who grew up in Middletown, Ohio. It was tough, but it was surrounded by loving people, and it was surrounded by something that, if we don't fight, is not going to be around for the next generation of kids, and that's opportunity.”
He also lavished praise on Trump, saying “he probably does have an IQ of 200” and that the U.S. has made “a lot of stupid decisions and President Donald Trump was right about every single one being a mistake,” citing the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Iraq War. Trump supported the invasion of Iraq at the time and even said an attack might be necessary in a 2000 book, years before the war began.
He promised to expand U.S. oil and natural gas extraction, to “shut down” the U.S.-Mexico border, to boost domestic production of medications and reduce trade with China and to reform the U.S. education system so the country has “that don't indoctrinate our children,” accusing Democrats of teaching kids that “it’s racist to do anything.”
“I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today. I'm sure they're going to call that racist too,” Vance said.
Democrats quickly attacked Vance after his rally.
“Vance’s trip to Ohio today is a glaring reminder of how Trump broke his promises to workers: presiding over the offshoring of jobs, factories shuttering, and thousands of Ohio workers losing their jobs — something he then said ‘doesn’t really matter,’” DNC spokesperson Alex Floyd said in a statement, referencing Trump’s comment on a now-shuttered Lordstown, Ohio, GM plant.
“Now, the Trump-Vance ticket is doubling down on an extreme Project 2025 agenda that would put the ultra-rich first on the backs of the middle class,” Floyd added.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.