JD Vance beats Tim Ryan in the 2022 Ohio Senate Race

JD Vance defeat­ed Tim Ryan in the race for Ohio’s Sen­ate seat this evening.  With 93% of the vote tal­lied, Repub­li­can JD Vance defeat­ed Demo­c­ra­t­ic mem­ber of Con­gress Tim Ryan by 54% to 46%.

This seat became open when incum­bent Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor Rob Port­man announced that he would not run for re-election.

Tim Ryan has rep­re­sent­ed Ohio’s 17th Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict from 2003 to 2013, after defeat­ing both his Repub­li­can oppo­nent and the pre­vi­ous Demo­c­ra­t­ic incum­bent for the seat, Jim Traf­fi­cant, who had been expelled from the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives after being con­vict­ed of var­i­ous fed­er­al charges and who ran his inde­pen­dent cam­paign from prison.  Since the reor­ga­ni­za­tion of con­gres­sion­al dis­tricts in Ohio in 2011, Ryan has rep­re­sent­ed Ohio’s 13th Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict. He has typ­i­cal­ly sup­port­ed con­ser­v­a­tive to mod­er­ate Demo­c­ra­t­ic posi­tions on var­i­ous pol­i­cy issues, and he chal­lenged unsuc­cess­ful­ly for the posi­tion of Speak­er of the House against Nan­cy Pelosi after the 2016 elec­tions. He eas­i­ly won elec­tion in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­ate primary.

The Repub­li­can can­di­date, J.D. Vance, is a lawyer, for­mer ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist and author of Hill­bil­ly Ele­gy, a book recount­ing his youth and relat­ing it to the prob­lems affect­ing Appalachi­an white low­er work­ing class and poor peo­ple. He moved back to Ohio in 2016 and cre­at­ed a ven­ture cap­i­tal firm with sup­port from Marc Andreessen and Peter Theil. (Theil has been a fun­der of a num­ber of Repub­li­can con­gres­sion­al cam­paigns this elec­tion cycle.) When he ran for the Repub­li­can Sen­ate pri­ma­ry, he was endorsed by Don­ald Trump, but it was very hard going in the sev­en-way race until the two then-lead­ing can­di­dates, Josh Man­del and Mike Gib­bons, focused their attacks on one anoth­er, with Gib­bons los­ing sup­port after­ward. Man­del then attacked ris­ing can­di­date Matt Dolan,  allow­ing Vance to slide by with a nar­row victory.

Both cam­paigns were not afraid to pro­vide hard-hit­ting messaging.

Ryan attacked Vance mer­ci­less­ly for the fail­ure and even­tu­al clo­sure of a non­prof­it, Our Ohio Renew­al, he had cre­at­ed to help Ohio res­i­dents regard­ing job­less­ness, addic­tion to opoids and result­ing bro­ken fam­i­lies, while at the same time hir­ing into the orga­ni­za­tion Dr. Sal­ly Satel, who has ques­tioned the role of pre­scrip­tion painkillers in the opi­oid cri­sis and who has close ties to Pur­due Phar­ma, the pro­duc­er of one of the worst addic­tive opi­oids, Oxy­con­tin, which recent­ly set­tled for a $6 bil­lion set­tle­ment in return for no fur­ther law­suits are charges against the com­pa­ny or its own­ers, the Sack­ler fam­i­ly. He also said that if Vance lost, he would go back to Cal­i­for­nia or over to Wash­ing­ton DC, accen­tu­at­ing the impres­sion that Vance was an oppor­tunis­tic carpetbagger.

But its also hurt Ryan occa­sion­al­ly, as when he attacked Chi­nese man­u­fac­tur­ing and received some back­lash from Asian-Amer­i­can groups con­cerned that such com­ments would per­pet­u­ate or increase acts of vio­lence against Asian-Amer­i­can indi­vid­u­als. Vance was not afraid to go fur­ther on the top­ic, at one point say­ing “We have to stop send­ing Amer­i­can jobs to peo­ple who hate us.”

Both have also been sup­port­ers of stricter immi­gra­tion con­trols and bor­der secu­ri­ty, with Vance direct­ly relat­ing these issues to increased access to the dead­ly drug fen­tanyl and imply­ing that the Biden admin­is­tra­tion delib­er­ate­ly allowed it to pass through the south­ern bor­der as an oppor­tunis­tic way to kill sup­port­ers of for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump.

Both can­di­dates and their cam­paigns accused their oppo­nent of car­ing more about their nation­al par­ty than the needs of Ohio vot­ers, Ryan tying Vance to for­mer Pres­i­dent Trump, radio host Alex Jones and the Jan­u­ary 6th attack on the Capi­tol in Wash­ing­ton DC, and Vance tying Ryan to Pres­i­dent Joe Biden and the cost of infla­tion on work­ing families.