Mr. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author, beat a crowded field with the help of a Trump endorsement. He will face Representative Tim Ryan, a Democrat, in November.
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Shane Goldmacher and Jazmine Ulloa
CINCINNATI — J.D. Vance, the best-selling author whose “Hillbilly Elegy” about life in Appalachia illuminated a slice of the country that felt left behind, decisively won the Ohio Senate primary on Tuesday after a late endorsement by Donald J. Trump helped him surge past his rivals in a crowded field.
Casting himself as a fighter against the nation’s elites, Mr. Vance ran as a Trump-style pugilist and outsider who railed against the threats of drugs, Democrats and illegal immigration, while thoroughly backpedaling from his past criticisms of the former president.
The contest, which saw nearly $80 million in television advertising, was one of the most anticipated of the 2022 primary season for its potential to provide an early signal of the direction of the Republican Party.
The result delivered a strong affirmation of Mr. Trump’s continued grip on his party’s base. But a fuller assessment of Mr. Trump’s sway will come through a series of primaries in the next four weeks — in West Virginia, North Carolina, Idaho, Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Mr. Vance had been trailing in most polls behind Josh Mandel, a former Ohio state treasurer who had also aggressively pursued Mr. Trump’s backing, until the former president’s mid-April endorsement helped vault Mr. Vance ahead. A third candidate, State Senator Matt Dolan, ran as a more traditional Republican, sometimes mocking his rivals for their unrelenting focus on the former president instead of Ohio issues and voters.
Cheers went up at Mr. Vance’s Cincinnati election party when The Associated Press called the race shortly after 9:30 p.m.
“The people who are caught between the corrupt political class of the left and the right, they need a voice,” Mr. Vance said in his victory speech. “They need a representative. And that’s going to be me.”
Mr. Vance is an unlikely champion of the Trumpian mantle, after calling the former president “reprehensible” in 2016 and even “cultural heroin.” But he had changed his tune entirely by 2022, and Mr. Trump called to congratulate him on his victory on Tuesday evening, according to a person briefed on the call.
With more than 90 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Vance was leading across almost the entire state. But the results also captured some of the tensions and demographic trade-offs of a Republican Party pulled in different directions as Mr. Dolan was strongest in the voter-rich cities of Cleveland and Columbus.
Trump-style Republicans did not prevail in the other top contest on Tuesday. Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a more traditional Republican who has held offices in the state for more than 40 years, finished far ahead of his multiple primary rivals after a strong right-wing challenge never gained traction despite some conservative backlash to Mr. DeWine’s early and assertive response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Mr. DeWine had almost double the votes of his closest rival, Jim Renacci, a former House member. In the fall, he will be running against Nan Whaley, the former mayor of Dayton, who won the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, becoming the first woman in Ohio history to be nominated by a major party for governor.
In the Senate race, Mr. Vance will now face Representative Tim Ryan, a 48-year-old Democrat from the Youngstown area who has positioned himself as a champion of blue-collar values and has not aligned with some of his party’s more progressive positions.
If Mr. Vance prevails in the fall, the 37-year-old graduate of Yale Law School and investor would become the second-youngest member of the Senate, the chamber’s youngest Republican and a rare freshman who would arrive in Washington with a national profile.
His book had achieved best seller status not just from conservatives but liberals, who in the wake of the 2016 election had used it as something of a decryption key to understand Mr. Trump’s appeal in rural reaches of the country.
Mr. Vance’s metamorphosis from an outspoken “Never Trump” Republican in 2016 to a full-throated Make America Great Again warrior in 2022 echoes the ideological journey of much of the party in recent years. Republicans have moved closer and closer to the former president’s hard-line policy positions on issues like trade and immigration, and to his combative posture with Democrats and on cultural issues that divide the two parties. For some Republican voters, the primary was animated by fears that traditional family values and a white American culture were under attack by far-left Democrats, establishment Republicans and elites.
From the very start, Mr. Vance did have a crucial financial benefactor: His former boss, Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor who pledged $10 million to Mr. Vance even before he formally joined the contest and who added millions more in the final stretch to trumpet Mr. Trump’s endorsement in the last weeks.
The Senate primary was unusual in the extent that it unfolded in two places at once. In Ohio, there was the typical fevered competition for votes, in town halls, debates and television ads. In Florida, there was the battle for Mr. Trump’s approval at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s private club, with public shows of fealty, lobbying by surrogates and shuttle diplomacy. In one episode last year, multiple Ohio candidates vied for Mr. Trump’s support in front of one another at an impromptu meeting at Mar-a-Lago.
In a verbal flub that seemed almost fitting to how the candidates ran, Mr. Trump accidentally conjoined the names of two rivals over the weekend. “We’ve endorsed J.P., right?” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Nebraska. “J.D. Mandel.”
Mr. Trump’s endorsement set off a frenzy among Ohio Republicans who questioned Mr. Vance’s Republican credentials, with rivals circulating fliers online and at a Trump rally accusing him of being a Democrat in disguise and resurrecting his past comments against Mr. Trump.
Mr. Mandel had been the front-runner for much of the race, casting himself as the true pro-Trump candidate (“Pro-God. Pro-Guns. Pro-Trump” was the tagline in his TV ads). But that became an all-but-impossible argument to prosecute in the final weeks after Mr. Trump picked Mr. Vance.
“If the whole issue in the campaign is who is most Trump-like, expect it to work against you when you don’t get the endorsement,” said Rex Elsass, an Ohio-based Republican strategist.
At a restaurant in the Cleveland suburb of Beachwood on Tuesday, more than a dozen Mandel supporters and campaign volunteers struck an optimistic tone at the start of the night, expressing confidence. But it was not too long before Mr. Mandel took the podium to deliver the news.
Mr. Mandel told the crowd that he called Mr. Vance “to congratulate him on a hard-fought victory” and would do what he could to help get him elected. “The stakes are too high for this country to not support the nominee,” Mr. Mandel said to a round of applause in the room.
Beyond Mr. Vance, Mr. Dolan and Mr. Mandel, the crowded race included a single female candidate, Jane Timken, a former Ohio Republican Party chair, who was backed by the retiring incumbent, Senator Rob Portman, as well as Mike Gibbons, a businessman who poured millions of his own money into the race and at one point had climbed to the top of the polls.
Mr. Dolan had toiled for most of the contest far behind the polling leaders, avoiding direct attacks from his rivals. But he tapped into his own fortune to fund more than $11 million in television ads as he cut a path separate from the rest of the Trump-focused field by refusing to amplify the falsehood that the 2020 election was rigged. At one debate, Mr. Dolan was the lone candidate to raise his hand to say the former president should stop talking about the 2020 election.
The contest was nasty and lengthy, with nothing capturing the intensity more than a near-physical confrontation between Mr. Gibbons and Mr. Mandel at one March debate, where they bumped bellies as they lobbed verbal threats at one another.
Mr. Vance scolded them both. “Sit down. Come on,” he said. “This is ridiculous.”
Much of the race was shaped by huge sums spent on television — nearly $80 million, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, with a lot of it coming from outside groups and out-of-state donors. The conservative Club for Growth spent more than $12 million on television ads aimed to boost Mr. Mandel or tear down his rivals.
Mr. Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor, seeded a pro-Vance super PAC with $10 million in early 2021 — months before Mr. Vance even entered the race. Mr. Vance is one of two former Thiel employees — the other is Blake Masters in Arizona — running for Senate with Mr. Thiel’s hefty financial backing. Mr. Thiel had served as a key link between Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump, attending an introductory meeting between them in early 2021.
The politics of Ohio have changed drastically in the Trump era. Once the quintessential presidential swing state, Ohio broke for Mr. Trump by 8 percentage points in both 2016 and 2020, ending a half-century streak of the state backing the national winner. Republicans have sharply run up their margins among working-class white voters and in more rural areas, offsetting the losses that the party has suffered in the state’s suburbs around cities like Columbus and Cleveland.
In the Democratic primary, Mr. Ryan, who briefly ran for president in 2020, easily turned back a primary challenge from Morgan Harper, 38, a former adviser at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who ran as a progressive, banking $5 million for the general election.
Mr. Ryan has already run an anti-China ad that focuses on Ohio jobs and his opening ad of the general election has him tossing darts inside a bar and seeking to separate himself from the broader Democratic brand, lamenting those who have called for defunding the police.
But Mr. Ryan faces an uphill race in a state that has trended Republican and in a year when his party is saddled with President Biden’s low approval ratings. Some Republicans see Mr. Ryan as formidable — Mr. Trump among them — but the general election is not seen by either party as among the half-dozen closest contests that will determine control of the Senate, now divided evenly 50-50.
Shane Goldmacher reported from Cincinnati. Jazmine Ulloa reported from Beachwood, Ohio.
Azi Paybarah
Ohio’s consequential Republican Senate primary dominated much of the attention on Tuesday evening, but it was far from the only race decided.
Here is a rundown of the winners and losers in some of the most important contests:
The win by J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” and a venture capitalist, who trailed in the polls until he was endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, won the Republican nomination for Senate, giving Mr. Trump an early victory in the midterm election season.
Mr. Vance had transformed himself from a Never-Trumper in 2016 to a grateful recipient of Mr. Trump’s support.
He defeated a crowded field of candidates — most notably, Josh Mandel, Mike Gibbons, Matt Dolan and Jane Timken. Many had tried to position themselves in the mold of Mr. Trump, but it appears that the former president’s backing mattered the most.
The victory by Representative Tim Ryan, a Democrat, means the November contest to replace Senator Rob Portman, a Republican who is retiring, will be a race between a seasoned politician on the left and a first-time candidate for office, Mr. Vance, on the right.
Mr. Ryan, who ran for president in 2020 complaining that the party had abandoned working-class voters, easily defeated two lesser-known, lesser-funded primary challengers: Morgan Harper and Traci Johnson.
Mr. Ryan echoed some of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, if with a slight tweak: “Right now, we have to be Americans first,” Mr. Ryan said in a TV ad, the last two words sounding similar to Mr. Trump’s “America First” agenda.
Representative Shontel Brown, a Democrat, last defeated Nina Turner in a special election for this Ohio House seat just nine months ago. Now she has done it again.
Two Democratic heavyweights offered their endorsements late in the race: President Biden, for Ms. Brown, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for Ms. Turner. And this time around, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC backed Ms. Brown.
Similar to their bitter 2021 matchup, Ms. Turner — who rose to national prominence as a surrogate for Senator Bernie Sanders — was the subject of attack ads funded by several outside groups that described her as too far afield from the Democratic base to be effective.
Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican who eschewed the combative and conspiratorial tones of Mr. Trump, easily dispatched the field of primary challengers that was led by Jim Renacci, who presented himself as a more Trump-aligned alternative to the governor.
Mr. DeWine, a low-key career politician who has been in elected office since the mid-1970s, won bipartisan praise for his handling of the pandemic — though not from Mr. Renacci, who wielded it against him. Mr. DeWine mainly stuck to bread-and-butter issues on the campaign trail, like cutting taxes and adding jobs.
Max Miller, whom the former president endorsed, clinched the Republican nomination in Ohio’s Seventh Congressional District — another deep-red district where Mr. Trump’s influence over the party was on display.
Two incumbents in the district declined to run. The first was Representative Anthony Gonzalez, who called Mr. Trump a “cancer” and retired after two terms.
The second, Representative Bob Gibbs, was aligned with Mr. Trump but was forced into the race against Mr. Miller late in his campaign, because of redistricting. He opted to retire, which more or less cleared the field for Mr. Miller.
Mr. Miller was accused of assault by an ex-girlfriend, Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary. Mr. Miller has denied the accusation and has sued Ms. Grisham.
Representative Greg Pence, a Republican and an older brother of former Vice President Mike Pence, easily beat his nominal primary opponent, James Alspach.
The elder Mr. Pence joined more than 140 other Republicans in the House in voting to overturn the presidential election results after a mob of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6. The younger Mr. Pence, who some in the mob had targeted, angered Mr. Trump and his supporters in saying he did not have the constitutional power to overturn the results.
The older Mr. Pence has said he stands by his brother.
J.R. Majewski, a self-styled political outsider, won the Republican nomination in Ohio’s Ninth Congressional District and will face Representative Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat who, if elected to her 21st term in November, would become the longest-serving female member of Congress.
The newly drawn district in the northern part of the state now tilts Republican, and attracted three well-funded Republican candidates, as well as spending from outside interest groups.
Mr. Majewski sought to tap into Mr. Trump’s MAGA energy, showing himself in television ads holding a gun as he told viewers, “I’m willing to do whatever it takes to return this country back to its former glory.”
He defeated Craig Riedel and Theresa Gavarone, state legislators who also ran as Trump-style conservatives.
Jennifer Medina and Jonathan Weisman
J.R. Majewski, an Air Force veteran who turned his front lawn into a giant Trump sign in 2020, won a crowded Republican congressional primary and will face Representative Marcy Kaptur, a 20-term Democrat, this fall.
Last year, Mr. Majewski raised thousands of dollars to bring a group to the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally near the Capitol. Not long after he announced his bid for Congress, he turned his Port Clinton lawn into a 19,000-square-foot mural featuring Donald J. Trump’s face.
The heavily gerrymandered district, Ohio’s Ninth, along the shore of Lake Erie has been reshaped during the recent once-a-decade redistricting process, with the Republicans who drew Ohio’s congressional map removing reliably Democratic areas on the outskirts of Cleveland.
Last year, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature approved a map that Democrats and voting rights groups argued could unfairly hand the G.O.P. at least 10 of the state’s 15 House seats.
Mr. Majewski portrayed himself as “the America First candidate,” and received support from Mr. Trump himself.
Mr. Majewski defeated Theresa Gavarone, a state senator, and Craig Riedel, a Republican state representative, in the crowded Republican primary.
If Ms. Kaptur wins in November, she will become the longest-serving female member of Congress. But some of her oldest and most dependable allies in labor unions are questioning whether she has a future in Washington and whether the Democratic Party can still represent the industrial region. And her challenge exemplifies the way labor politics have changed in the region.
Mr. Trump would have won the newly drawn district by three percentage points, giving Republicans confidence that they can prevail. But in 2020, Ms. Kaptur outperformed Joseph R. Biden Jr. by six points in parts of the district,and Democrats hope that her name recognition, long record and popularity will carry her to victory.
Support for a natural gas and crude oil pipeline has become a primary issue in the race, largely because it supplies a refinery with 1,200 union workers in Toledo. Several Democrats have called for the pipeline to be shut down, while Republicans, including Mr. Majewski, have opposed doing so.
Trip Gabriel
Before the 2016 election, J.D. Vance called Donald J. Trump “cultural heroin” and a demagogue who was “leading the white working class to a very dark place.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Vance’s triumph in a crowded Republican field for Senate in Ohio was thanks largely to an endorsement, late in the race, from the former president he once denounced.
The conversion of Mr. Vance, an author and venture capitalist, from Trump skeptic to full-on Trump ally might fill a second memoir, a sequel to his best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance’s story of growing up poor in Kentucky and Ohio. When that book was published in 2016, it was devoured by the “coastal elites” he now rails against as a means for them to decode white working-class support for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Vance’s book pointed inward to explain the woes of his community: He blamed a personal “lack of agency” for drug abuse, welfare dependency and chaotic lives. But as a politician, he has pointed the finger outward, at external enemies, just as Mr. Trump did.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Vance blamed corporations for shipping jobs to China and accused liberals of opening borders to cheap labor and opioid traffickers. The intimate voice of “Hillbilly Elegy” yielded to a darker tone and language. He castigated “idiots” in Washington and “scumbags” in the news media.
His critics, including Republican rivals in Ohio, said he had turned himself inside-out to mimic Mr. Trump’s bellicosity in pursuit of votes. Opponents spent millions on attack ads to remind voters that Mr. Vance had once called himself “a Never Trump guy” and had said some voters backed Mr. Trump “for racist reasons.”
Mr. Vance, on a slog across Ohio he called the “No B.S. Town Hall Tour,” explained to modest crowds that he had undergone a political evolution, recognizing that Mr. Trump was right on issue after issue.
“I was like, ‘Man, you know, when Trump says the elites are fundamentally corrupt, they don’t care about the country that has made them who they are, he was actually telling the truth,’” he told a conservative podcaster last year.
Today, Mr. Vance, who graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State University and went on to Yale Law School, has found a political home with the movement known as national conservatism, an effort to add an intellectual framework to Trumpism. National conservatives lean right on issues like diversity and immigration restrictions but lean left on economics, opposing unfettered free trade, especially with China.
Mr. Vance, 37, grew up in Middletown, Ohio, where a grandfather had moved from Kentucky for a steel mill job. In the years after J.D. Vance was born in 1984, the city hollowed out as blue-collar jobs left, opioids arrived, marriages dissolved and much of the industrial Midwest became “a hub of misery” for the white working class, he wrote in his memoir.
Mr. Vance’s mother, Bev, struggled with drug addiction. He was raised largely by his maternal grandparents, particularly the grandmother he called Mamaw, who “loved the Lord,” “loved the F-word” and owned 19 handguns, he said on the campaign trail.
Out of high school, Mr. Vance enlisted in the Marines and served in Iraq as a public affairs officer. He returned home a man in a hurry, sailing through Ohio State in under two years.
At Yale, he met a fellow student he would marry, Usha Chilukuri, who went on to clerk for an appeals court judge, Brett M. Kavanaugh. Democrats’ fierce opposition to Mr. Trump’s nomination of Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018 appeared to be a turning point in Mr. Vance’s political transformation.
“Trump’s popularity in the Vance household went up substantially during the Kavanaugh fight,” he recalled in 2019.
Mr. Vance went to work as a venture capitalist in San Francisco for Peter Thiel, a billionaire founder of PayPal, whom he had heard speak at Yale. Mr. Thiel, a Silicon Valley conservative, also influenced Mr. Vance’s politics, especially his opposition to China and to immigration.
When Mr. Vance moved his family, which now includes three children, back to Ohio, he raised money from Mr. Thiel for a venture capital fund of his own — and followed the Thiel tradition by naming the business, Narya Capital, with a “Lord of the Rings” reference.
Mr. Thiel poured $13.5 million into a political action committee to support Mr. Vance’s race.
