DURHAM, New Hampshire – Democrat Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan says that Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, who is running for vice president as a Republican, has changed.
Due to Vance’s blue-collar background, former President Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, and his campaign are sure that the senator will help the Republican ticket in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which have long been part of the Democrats’ “blue wall.”
Fox News asked Whitmer if she agreed with the Trump campaign’s point of view on Vance. Whitmer said, “Maybe if it was the JD Vance who wrote Hillbilly Elegy.” But it’s not the same person. It is someone who has completely betrayed those ideals and that book and turned into something that is just like Donald Trump.
“Maybe even more concerning than a reflection of Donald Trump,” he said. “I would say that that kind of leadership is not something that’s going to resonate and that’s why we’ve got to make sure people know who he is.”
Gretchen Whitmer and other career lawmakers can lie about me all they want, but Vance said in a statement to Fox News, “I’ll always put American workers and families first because I’ll never forget where I came from.”
“It’s career politicians like her who support the radical Kamala-Biden agenda to leave our southern border wide open, strangle American energy, kill the automobile industry with their electric vehicle mandates, and drive up the cost of living through inflationary spending who clearly have forgotten about the people she’s supposed to be representing,” Vance said.
People all over the country became aware of Vance a few years ago after he wrote “Hillbilly Elegy,” a book that tells the story of his upbringing in Appalachian Kentucky, and a failing steel mill city in southwest Ohio. It was a big hit in the New York Times and was turned into a Netflix movie. Many working-class Americans who supported Trump’s policies did so because the story showed what they believed in.
Vance’s working-class parents split up when he was young, and his mother had a long history of alcohol and drug abuse. Vance was raised in part by his grandparents on his mom’s side.
After Vance graduated from high school, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps and fought in the Iraq War. After graduating from Ohio State University, he went to Yale University to get his law degree. He then moved to San Francisco and worked as a principal in a venture capital company before going back to Ohio to run for the Senate in 2022.
When the former president first ran for the White House in 2016, Vance spoke out against Trump.
But in the end, Vance backed Trump and praised the former president’s time in office. In a 2021 interview with Fox News, he said sorry for criticizing Trump earlier.
Trump’s support for Vance in the days before the 2022 GOP Senate primary helped him win in a very crowded, tough, and potentially explosive nomination fight. A short time after being elected to the Senate, Vance quickly became one of the strongest supporters of Trump’s “America First” plan and the “MAGA” movement.
Whitmer talked to Fox News at a house party in Durham, New Hampshire. She is the Democratic Party’s leader and has been governor of a key swing state in the Midwest for two terms. Thursday was her third and last campaign stop in the important New England swing state for Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris took over for Vice President Joe Biden as the party’s likely presidential candidate this week.
In a huge announcement on Sunday, President Biden stopped his re-election race against Trump in 2024 and backed his running mate. Biden’s move came as Democratic Party members put more and more pressure on him to drop out of the race after he did so badly in the first presidential debate with Trump last month.
The president’s quick support for Harris sparked a wave of support for Harris from Democratic governors, senators, House members, and other party leaders. By Monday night, the vice president had announced that she had secured the nomination of her party by getting the support of most of the nearly 4,000 delegates to the Democratic National Convention next month. Not only that, but her team said Thursday morning that she had raised an amazing $129 million since Biden’s announcement.
“Being a co-chair of the Biden campaign made me happy and grateful.” A few hundred people at the house party cheered when Whitmer said, “I am also grateful and honored to be a co-chair of the Harris campaign.”
In the last 24 years, no Republican has won New Hampshire in a presidential election. However, new polls show that Biden and Trump are very close.
However, two new polls released Thursday in the state showed that Harris was only a few points ahead of Trump in the popular vote.