RADFORD, Va. -- Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance got a warm welcome from supporters in Radford, Virginia Monday night. The Ohio Senator talked about family, loyalty, and hard work; characteristics penned in his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” and ones he hoped would resonate with Southwest Virginians, where job loss and drug addiction have hit hard.
“For years Washington insiders in both parties have sold out places like Middletown, Ohio, and like Radford, Virginia,” Vance said. “Both parties shipped millions of good manufacturing jobs overseas. They decided we didn’t need to make anything in America again.”
In Vance’s first solo appearances on the campaign trail since the GOP Convention last week, Donald Trump’s Vice-Presidential pick held a rally in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio earlier Monday before visiting Radford, where he spoke about energy policies, immigration, and the fentanyl crisis that has devastated the region.
Vance told the audience that his mother struggled with opioid addiction for most of his childhood.
“If the same poison that’s coming across the border now was coming across the border 20 years ago, I don’t know whether I would have gotten a second chance with my mother,” Vance said. “There are a lot of families across the country who are not getting second chances with loved ones because the cartels are bringing poison into this country at a level we’ve never seen.”
Virginia Congressman Morgan Griffith (R - Bristol), who also attended Monday night’s rally, said Vance’s message about his mother’s addiction resonates with thousands of people living in Southwest Virginia.
“They were dumping pills in here like crazy,” Griffith said. “That’s why the very first lawsuit against the drug manufacturers was in Abington, Virginia.”
Both parties are eyeing Virginia this presidential election as a potential swing or battleground state. Virginia hasn’t voted for a GOP presidential candidate since 2004, but Republican strategists see the tide changing.
CBS 6 political analyst Dr. Bob Holsworth said one of Trump’s key political consultants, Chris LaCivita, is from Richmond and understands Virginia elections.
“It would be political malpractice for the Republicans if they didn’t look at Virginia. One might remember back in 2016, when Hillary Clinton thought that she had the election wrapped up and didn’t even visit Wisconsin,” Holsworth said. “I don’t think Chris LaCivita, Governor Glenn Youngkin, and the Donald Trump campaign are going to make that mistake about Virginia.”
The Trump campaign hopes Vance’s life story will appeal to the Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, while also resonating in areas like western Virginia, long considered part of the Appalachia region, where Vance says families have been forgotten.
Vance slams Kamala Harris during his solo campaign debut
Vance also used his first solo campaign rallies in Ohio and Virginia on Monday to throw fresh barbs at Vice President Kamala Harris a day after President Joe Biden threw the presidential election into upheaval by dropping out and endorsing his second-in-command to lead Democrats against Trump.
“History will remember Joe Biden as not just a quitter, which he is, but as one of the worst presidents in the history of the United States of America," Vance said in Virginia. “But my friends, Kamala Harris is a million times worse and everybody knows it. She signed up for every single one of Joe Biden’s failures, and she lied about his mental capacity to serve as president.”
Vance sought to saddle Harris with the administration’s record on inflation and immigration, clarifying the lines of attack that the Trump campaign would use even with the change at the top of the Democratic ticket. Harris still must be formally nominated but has quickly consolidated commitments from top party leaders and is now backed publicly by enough delegates to win her party’s nomination vote, according to an Associated Press survey.
“The border crisis is a Kamala Harris crisis," Vance said, accusing Biden and Harris together of rolling back immigration policies that Trump enacted in his White House term. He added Harris is “even more extreme than Biden” because, Vance alleged, she has designs on abolishing federal immigration enforcement and domestic police forces.
Vance, 39, drew biographical contrasts with Harris, as well, comparing his service in the Marine Corps and small business ownership to Harris “collecting a government paycheck for the last 20 years.”
Harris, 59, was a local prosecutor, then California attorney general, and a U.S. senator before she ran for president unsuccessfully in 2020 and became Biden’s running mate. Vance was elected to the Senate two years ago.
Vance also fulfilled his role as Trump's biggest cheerleader, promising the former president would lead an era of peace and prosperity in a White House encore, while helping Republicans dominate House, Senate, and state contests.
“We've got an opportunity to win races up and down the ballot," he said.
He promised, “You're going to see more and more products stamped with that beautiful logo: ‘Made in the USA.’” He also asked the crowd, “Who is sick of sending America's sons and daughters into foreign lands they have no business in?”
The senator carefully stopped short of outright isolationism, however, pledging the U.S. would “punch back hard” when necessary. Vance did not detail any policy approach to the wars that have most vexed the Biden administration: Vladimir Putin's Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
Those arguments are at the core of Trump's “America First” brand and highlight Vance's electoral strengths as the son of Appalachia. Trump's campaign intends to use him heavily across the Rust Belt and swaths of small-town America where voters have moved to the right and remain especially frustrated over decades of what Vance called “bad trade deals.”
Trump and Vance sat Saturday for a joint interview with Fox News that was aired Monday evening after the senator’s rallies. Trump nodded to the fact that Vance, during his brief political career, has morphed from being a harsh Trump critic, at one point likening him to Adolf Hitler, to a staunch defender.
“Originally, JD was probably not for me, but he didn’t know me,” Trump told Fox host Jesse Watters as Vance looked on. “And then when we got to know each other, he liked me maybe more than anybody liked me, and he would stick up for me. ... We just had an automatic chemistry.”
Earlier Monday in Ohio, Vance tried to deflect the criticism that Trump, who has refused to accept his 2020 loss to Biden and tried to overturn the results, is a threat to democracy. The senator claimed that the real threat came from the push by “elite Democrats” who “decided to throw Joe Biden overboard” and then have the party line up behind a replacement without primary contests.
Democrats, he said in Virginia, lied “for three-and-a-half years” only to “pull a switcheroo.”
While Republicans promoted a unifying message at the Republican National Convention where Vance was nominated last week and decried inflammatory language in the wake of the assassination attempt against Trump, one of the first speakers to introduce Vance in Ohio suggested the country may need to come to civil war if Trump loses in November.
“I believe wholeheartedly, Donald Trump and Butler County’s JD Vance are the last chance to save our country,” said George Lang, a Republican state senator. “Politically, I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country and it will be saved. It’s the greatest experiment in the history of mankind."
Lang later apologized after Harris' team highlighted his remarks on a post on X.
“I regret the divisive remarks in the excitement of the moment on stage,” he said on the same social network. “Especially in light of the assassination attempt on President Trump last week, we should all be mindful of what is said at political events, myself included.”
Vance still has work to do raising his profile. 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 13% of registered voters said they had a favorable opinion of Vance and 20% had an unfavorable one, according to the poll.
After Vance was named as Trump’s running mate, a startling number of Republican delegates, who are typically party insiders and activists, said they did not know much about the senator.
In his hometown in Ohio, though, he was welcomed as a local star.
Darlene Gooding, 77, of Hamilton, said Vance will provide a welcome contrast to Trump.
“Trump doesn’t always come off the best. It’s all about him," she said. "JD is wonderful. He gives you the idea he really cares about people.”
In Virginia, Trump backers were warming quickly to his new running mate.
Pamela Holloway, who came to see Vance in Radford, described herself as a former Democrat who has gravitated to Republicans. She said she recently bought Vance's book to learn more about how his experiences have shaped his political outlook.
“He's truthful,” she said of his writing. “He talks about his mother being an addict. He talks about the hardships with his grandmother” who raised him. “He talks about things that aren't fake.”
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The Associated Press journalist Leah Willingham contributed to this report. Michelle Price reported from New York. Julie Carter Smyth reported from Middletown, Ohio. Bill Barrow reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writers Bruce Schreiner in Louisville, Kentucky, and Adriana Gomez Licon in Lambertville, New Jersey contributed
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