CityBeat’s limited-series podcast about JD Vance, Elegy: The Many Myths of JD Vance released its final episode on Nov. 8, featuring a roundtable discussion on the Republican presidential victory.
The roundtable was hosted by CityBeat’s Madeline Fening, Elegy host Ashley Paul, University of Cincinnati political scientist David Niven, Ohio Capital Journal Editor-in-Chief David DeWitt, and John Isner, host of Appodlachia, a podcast about issues and people in the Appalachian region.
Keep reading for highlights from the roundtable discussion, and visit the Elegy feed on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to hear the full episode.
This episode was recorded on Wednesday, Nov. 6.
Madeline Fening: Former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance, a Middletown native, will be the next President and Vice President of the United States. Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris, winning every swing state and the popular vote. Harris has conceded the race at this point.
Polling was showing a slight lead for Harris before Election Day, or at least a race that was much closer than what we ended up seeing. Did the polls get it wrong in the same way we saw in 2016? What’s the difference here?
David Niven: Well, I think the bottom line is, polling is more art than science than we’d like to admit. And polls are inherently built around a projection of exactly who’s going to vote. And you don’t know. The secret sauce of it is you’re mixing the respondents that you get with a waiting factor to try and account for who’s going to vote and who doesn’t.
You know, 2016 and 2024 underweighted the Republican vote, and 2022 underweighted the Democratic vote, it’s not an easy thing to do. And in a country that is closely divided, it makes all the difference in terms of our expectations.
David DeWitt: Speaking of trying to predict who will vote and who will not vote, there was a significant drop-off in voting between 2020 and 2024. And I think people staying home had a big effect on the results that we’re seeing.
Fening: Speaking of polling, this question is for Ashley Paul: Exit polls are showing that slightly more men were likely to be Trump voters in 2024 versus 2020, but there was also a jump in male Latino voters – in 2020, 36% of male Latino voters chose Trump over Biden, but that number jumped to 54% in the Trump versus Harris race this year. We also saw a big jump in young voters choosing Trump. In 2020, 36% of voters between the ages of 18-29 voted for Trump, but that number jumped to 42% in 2024.
We cannot understate how much alternative media and influencers played a key role for both campaigns, but especially the Trump-Vance campaign. Like, when Trump and Vance went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and Theo Von’s podcast – which voters do you think Trump and Vance connected with the most in these spaces?
Ashley Paul: There are two kinds of perspectives I want to bring in. One, as someone who’s worked in marketing and obviously storytelling here with you guys, but also just seeing things in my own life.
It’s who the New York Times calls “target persuadables and low propensity voters.” Obviously, the target persuadables in this case were young, some say under 30, all races but specifically non-white males that they were trying to target with these kinds of social media strategies or invade those spaces. I think Hasan Piker kind of talked about how like these spaces have been commandeered by Republicans and at least right-leaning sort of politics and culture, right? So, it’s not just specifically men who have voted who are in those spaces. It’s men who haven’t voted – low propensity, right?
I know in my own life, personally, someone very close to me and my family has never voted. They are also a non-white 30-year-old male who hangs out in these kinds of spaces. And for most of the election cycle, they thought they were voting for RFK Jr. Or not voting. And at the last minute, decided to vote for Trump. I think what’s so interesting about that is that it’s not that we should have seen it coming or it was super unexpected or anything like that. It’s just that, how clear and defined and targeted and laser-focused Vance specifically and Trump have been in this specific demographic I think showed huge returns when it comes to the voting numbers.
John Isner: I mean, I’m in that demographic. I don’t listen to Theo Von, but I’m a 30-year-old. I’m a white male, but still in that male category that they deem persuadable. And if you think about it, look at the narrative that they created throughout – made Democrats look like the anti-man party, the party against men. And what does that do? It riles people up.
That’s the entirety of a presidential election. It’s not to just convince people to vote for you, it’s also to convince people not to vote for the other guy. That’s the biggest issue that we saw in this election. Donald Trump and JD Vance did a fantastic job of coming out and saying, it’s not what I’m going to do for you. It’s what they’re going to do to you. And that’s the difference that we saw between the two. And I think that’s where Donald Trump, just like in 2016, was able to capitalize.
DeWitt: Just something that stuck out to me was how effective it was to go for this online, this very online strategy compared to previous cycles. I think of the vaunted Obama ground games of 2008 and 2012. Kamala had a billion dollars compared to 380 million for Trump. Trump exported his ground game to third-party vendors and focused a lot of his efforts on doing these online forums, these online town halls and things like that. And I don’t know if it’s a long term shift in campaigning toward fully digital like this, but I think it was very effective, especially in the demographics you mentioned, just young people in general, especially young men, but even young women made a more rightward shift this election. And I think that that very online type of culture we’ve got going is not going away anytime soon.
Fening: Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was held up as sacred text to make sense of Trump’s win in 2016. That book then propelled Vance to eventually become Trump’s 2024 running mate in an election that has many Americans asking the same question they originally turned to Hillbilly Elegy to answer: Why did Trump win? What do you think is different this time around?
Isner: If you look back at the 2016 election, it was easy to pinpoint the states that flipped to Trump. And a lot of people started to narrate that it was only Appalachian and only rural voters that voted for Donald Trump, which we know when you look down the demographics of the voters, that’s not true, but it was easy for the national media to take that from that book and say, ‘Aha, we got it! This is why they won.’ And it’s just an easy running point. In 2016, you had Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton, both non-incumbents, right? This year you have Donald Trump and Harris. There’s an interesting dynamic there because once you strip Biden off the ballot, you create this new power struggle: Does Trump then become almost an incumbent-like politician at that point? Because he’s the one who has something he can run on. Not to mention a massive difference is we’ve never seen a presidential campaign switch in July of that election year and then all of a sudden put someone new on the ballot.
Trump did a much better job of connecting deeper with voters because he had four years to campaign. That’s all he’s been doing for four years. She had three months. Big difference, right? Another key issue here too is if you go back to the 2016 election, just look at rural voters in general, right? When it came to ballot initiatives, they stayed on the conservative side. If they voted for Donald Trump on ballot initiatives, they voted conservatively. That’s not what we saw in this election. In the 2024 breakdown, if you look, people split tickets when it comes to who they voted for for the presidency and who they voted for for ballot initiatives. Look at Nebraska. It’s a great example, right? Nebraska went heavily for Donald Trump. They just supported raising the minimum wage there and being able to have paid leave. Missouri, same thing — raising minimum wage, paid leave. In general you saw ballot initiatives that in 2016 would not have passed that did this time. So that tells you more about the politicians on the ballot than it does the voter, I think.
Paul: For me, I’m looking at what’s happening in Michigan. I’m from Northwest Ohio. I grew up in Toledo, very close to Michigan. And Michigan flipping, for me, I think, was the biggest shock of the night, truly. And also not a shock, because if you look at the breakdown, so the largest shift – it’s the 9.2% Republican gain – was in Wayne County, and that’s where Dearborn is. That has an 8% Arab American population, so it’s blue, it’s very blue. And it had a 9.2% Republican shift. That is the largest Republican shift in all of Michigan. So all of these rural Michigan voters who voted for and against their Democratic governor, they didn’t change nearly as much towards Republicans as the bluest part of the state. That is because there were people not turning out or they were voting for the other, you know, the other candidates, the third party candidates, which was 161,000 of them. So this whole idea, as John was saying, of the rural voter and that’s the people we need to really dig into, it’s bigger than that. It’s that people are voting for Trump who ostensibly for no other reason are Democrat, and it’s that they’re connecting on something else, and that something else is the cultural element that Vance was so keen to pinpoint.
Fening: David Niven, what do you think about the third party element in this race? Because I felt like we had, maybe for the first time in a while, a third party candidate that people knew about just in general. I mean, RFK Jr. eventually came out in support for Trump, but he was on that radar last night. I’m just curious if you have anything on that.
Niven: So certainly the reality is a lot of Americans say they’d like third party candidates and say they’d like alternatives, but then never actually vote for that third party candidate. And the fortunes of third parties are inextricably tied into the prominence of whatever candidate they’re able to come up with. Third parties have had their moments in the sun at the state level. Jesse Ventura gets himself elected governor of Minnesota a couple of decades ago based on being famous and running as kind of the outsider in the system. I don’t think ultimately it mattered much in 2024 in the outcome. If you look to sort of expand on, what happened? Well, this thing happened everywhere. And it’s not just the states that Trump won, it’s the margins that declined in the states that he lost. You look at it, New Jersey was shockingly close number in a state that doesn’t really have rural people. You know, this is a top to bottom triumph of a campaign that was run on the capacity to state their own reality and to sort of perpetuate Trump’s approach, not just to politics, but to life, that there shall never be a consequence to anything one does.
Fening: I want to turn to a couple key issues here that were popping up in this campaign. A big one in this campaign on both sides was immigration. David Dewitt, this question is for you. Since immigration was such a big issue pushed not only by the Trump-Vance campaign, but cited by many voters on both sides as one of their biggest factors in who they decided to cast a ballot for in this election, I’d like to know how did the Haitian migrant population in Springfield, Ohio become such a lightning rod for this conversation? And, as a Springfield native yourself, what sort of fallout can we expect to see in Springfield now?
DeWitt: Well, to be clear, I grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio, but my parents are both from Springfield and four of my grandparents lived their whole lives in Springfield. I’ve spent a lot of time in Springfield and I keep going there because I have a lot of family there. But to answer your question, how did Haitians in Springfield, Ohio become a big topic? Republican politicians ran with that to use as an example of one of these cities where immigrants are “overrunning the city.” Tim Alberta did a great piece in the Atlantic just right before the election where he kind of gave the backstory to where JD Vance blew this up into a national firestorm the day before the debate. So that Monday, JD Vance, according to Tim Alberta’s reporting, he wanted to put his mark, his stamp on the campaign. And he had been marinating in this kind of right-wing agitprop in Springfield about pets supposedly being eaten by the Haitian migrants there, which was first raised by a white supremacist at the city commission meeting. So JD Vance is kind of marinating in that and he decides, you know, let’s go for it. Let’s tweet this out on a Monday and accuse Haitians of eating people’s pets in Springfield. And he does that and Trump’s campaign, according to Alberta, was trying to run a very disciplined campaign, but that was like catnip to Trump, right? So we got to the debate the next day and this had blown up into a national firestorm. And Trump couldn’t resist, and he does that, “they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs” during the debate and it turns into a real kind of tragedy for Springfield. Of course, they doubled down, they lied. They were factually proven wrong and they kept repeating it. Eating the cats and then raising the disease rates and then committing murders – none of that was corroborated, none of it was true, according to local elected officials.
What they’ve promised to do now, we’ll see how much they carry out, but they’ve promised to revoke the legal status of the migrants in Springfield. They’ve promised to obviously deport everyone. They want to send the 12,000 temporary status Haitian immigrants in Springfield back to Haiti. Which is riddled with violence, by the way, right now. Gang violence and the government’s been toppled there and it’s very chaotic. That’s why the people are fleeing Haiti. But there’s also 300,000 other Haitians in the United States that they want to round up and deport, along with the 20 million other immigrants in the country.
And that’s what they’ve said that they’re going to do. Obviously people have raised the factual reality that this is going to be a massive scale operation that’s going to cause a lot of chaos. We’re going to be seeing a lot of crazy things on our TV sets at night and the news if they do try to carry this out. We’re going to be seeing American police kicking down doors and hauling families out of their homes if they carry this out. For Springfield, if they carry that out, they’re going to lose 12,000 factory workers and whatever they’re contributing to the economy, as well as a bunch of restaurants and population.
Fening: Speaking of the economy, perhaps the other biggest issue for voters in this election was the economy, it was our pocketbooks. We know that the cost of living and interest rates, it’s all a very real problem that voters live with every day. But how did Trump and Harris engage in honest solution-offering on the economy? And why do you think that Trump is perhaps more poised to really rally voters behind his idea of a better economy?
Niven: Selling discontent is Trump’s approach to virtually anything. So, you pick at whatever the point is that you think folks can get riled up about. This objectively is a remarkable economy in terms of low unemployment. This is objectively. Harris was part of an administration that took on a country treading water because of COVID and took it forward. But, you know, they’re not selling a plan so much as they’re selling an attitude. They’re selling a perspective on things. And it would be a lot harder for Trump to sort of run in a celebratory context. So this is the natural playbook for him.
DeWitt: I think one thing that’s significant to point out is that we’ve had reporting in the last week that there’s enormous economic headwinds behind the next administration. And there are, but there has been a lot of discontent. So ideally, it’s kind of weird to say, but ideally, Trump just accepts the fact that he’s being handed a really strong economy and doesn’t do too much to mess it up. And again, his plans for the across the board tariffs and stuff, economists, most respected economists say that that’s going to be inflationary. His policies are kind of in conflict there. I do think that there is a very strong element of this election that was a reaction against the incumbent administration over how people perceive the economy over the last four years.
Fening: Dave Niven, could you walk us through the process of choosing Vance’s Senate replacement. Who’s gonna be in charge of that?
Niven: Well, Ohio gives that power entirely to the governor, as most states do. Some have taken it away and forced a special election, but here in Ohio, the governor has the power. He can choose anyone who’s eligible to serve in the Senate. So 30-year-old Ohioans, raise your hand, you’re eligible to serve in the Senate. I think the choice that he faces is to either kind of advance, for possibly the last time, a Republican in the traditional Ohio Republican mold that he is of, which is somebody who’s conservative, but might give you a hug rather than somebody from the fire-breathing Trump wing that’s obviously taken over. The other option for him, if he doesn’t want to go in the direction of somebody like a Matt Dolan from his wing of the party, the other option is to try and head off the next nasty Republican primary fight. So for example, right now it looks like the Lieutenant Governor and the Attorney General are on a collision course in a gubernatorial primary. Pick your Lieutenant Governor, put him in the Senate, and you head off that nasty primary.
DeWitt: Other names that I’m hearing that are possible for consideration: We know Secretary of State Frank LaRose. He ran in the primary for Senate as well. We know that he definitely wants it. He’s probably lobbying the governor for it. I don’t know what DeWine thinks about that. Other names that I’ve heard mentioned are Vivek Ramaswamy. He’s looking to do something. He’s making himself very well known after his presidential run. He definitely wants to stay. I think that he’ll be lobbying as well. And then some other just names that I’ve heard are the former GOP chair, Jane Timken, and Congressman Mike Carey, who just won reelection as well to the U.S. House. So those are basically the names I can think of that I’ve heard mentioned.
Isner: I think that makes it a very interesting race in 2026 because essentially Sherrod Brown could run once again for a Senate seat in Ohio, only two years removed from the Senate. So if the Republicans fumble the bag, so to say, Sherrod Brown has something to run on in 2026 and get back into the Senate, only two years removed. So I think that that’s a very interesting race that could be headed to Ohio.
Fening: We talked earlier about how many in America today are asking the question again, why did Trump win? Why is he going to be the next president? But I’d love to hear from everyone after eight years of Hillbilly Elegy and failed startup ventures and weird interview moments, no bills passed in the Senate…Why is Vance going to be our next vice president?
Niven: Well, I think the most direct answer is he was chosen to never say no to Trump. That’s his main qualification. And he certainly demonstrated that in the campaign. And I think that’s the expectation in the administration. And obviously, as we’ve discussed, he not only echoed Trump during the campaign, he advanced some of the, you know, the angriest, loudest rhetoric of the campaign. In some sense, he is Trumpier than Trump because he’s a little bit more creative. Trump is relying on a lot of things handed to him. Vance helped sort of blow Springfield up single-handedly.
DeWitt: He became really good friends with Donald Trump Jr. And he displayed his willingness to toe the Trump line and be Trump’s strongest defender. And then he proved that he could win an election in 2022. And people like Elon Musk and Don Jr. were promoting Vance. Whereas some more traditional Republican types like Rupert Murdoch and others were promoting somebody like Tim Scott. And Trump went with the Elon Musk, Don Jr. crowd and then went with Vance.
Isner: And Peter Thiel, the guy from PayPal. I mean, that’s the other guy who swayed this entire election and did so out of just pure greed. And rightfully so. I mean, he picked the right winner, right? JD Vance. Make no mistake about it. He has a lot of terrible, terrible traits and qualities and a lack of morals. But all of those things don’t matter when you’re very good at strategy. JD Vance is that.
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This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 12, 2024.