Boy, J.D. Vance Sure Did Eviscerate Tim Ryan In That Debate Tonight, Huh?
This post could make the case for what’s in the headline with a lot of convincing rhetoric, but your author has had a long day and is thus lazy.
So instead, we’ll just show you the video clips of what J.D. Vance, the first-time Republican candidate, did to 20-year congressional veteran Democrat Tim Ryan in the Ohio Senate debate tonight, and you can see it for yourself.
Ohio might be the biggest pickup opportunity in the whole Senate from a revivalist perspective. It’s a senate seat currently held by Rob Portman, a Bush Republican who ranks as one of the more disappointing of the “Washington Generals” in that body – subservient Republicans who play nothing but defense, and soft defense at that, while Democrats run roughshod. Vance, as you’ll see in the debate clips, is not of that sort.
He’s whip-smart and above all, he’s aggressive.
Vance is the author of the bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which came out a few years ago and was made into a Ron Howard movie starring Sissy Spacek. He grew up poor to a dysfunctional family in working-class, small-town Ohio and dragged himself up through the Marine Corps and Ohio State University to Yale Law School, which launched him into an interesting career as a venture capitalist. Vance comes about his conservative politics from a working-class perspective; he’s by no means a practitioner of Portman’s establishment/globalist Bushie politics. Instead, he’s much more of the America First/revivalist point of view and he’s staked out territory as the advocate of blue-collar Appalachia where his roots are.
But to listen to Vance you wouldn’t really know it. He doesn’t sound like a hillbilly. He sounds like a passionate guy who knows his opponent for a fraud and a tool of the elites, and he’s got zero compunction about letting Ryan have both barrels for it.
Vance has a small lead in the current polls of that race, though RealClear Politics rates it “Leans Republican.” It’s a good bet things will firm up nicely for him after this beatdown.
And this was the coup de grace that everybody is going to remember…
This was an utter blowout of a debate, even more of a sandblasting than Blake Masters gave Mark Kelly in Arizona. It furthers the point we’ve been making for some time now, which is that revivalist iconoclasts like Vance and Masters, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and others are the future of the GOP and Bush Republicans are its disgraced past.
There is a red wave building out there and it’ll greatly benefit the Republicans next month. But that wave isn’t based on a GOP qualified to be a governing party yet. It’s built on a rejection of what the Democrats have become under Team Biden’s tutelage. But turn over enough Rob Portmans for J.D. Vances, and that calculus changes.
We’re starting to see that happen before our very eyes now.
