For the first time since becoming vice president of the United States, JD Vance has returned to his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, with a goal of rallying Republican voters ahead of November\u2019s pivotal midterm elections.<\/p>\n
Vance delivered Friday\u2019s speech at a symbolic location: the steel plant where his late grandfather once worked.<\/p>\n
Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list<\/p>\n
He used the appearance to tout a $1bn investment from the steel manufacturer Cleveland-Cliffs that was supported by $500m in government awards.<\/p>\n
That funding, he said, illustrated his party\u2019s commitment to the manufacturing sector and reinvigorating the US economy overall.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not saying it\u2019s going to be easy \u2013 or it\u2019s all going to happen overnight \u2013 but in just 18 months, we have seen an explosion of rebuilding in the American heartland,\u201d Vance said, crediting the growth to policies under President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
Vance\u2019s speech comes at a critical time for the Republican Party and Trump in particular.<\/p>\n
November\u2019s midterm races will decide whether Republicans are able to maintain control over both chambers of Congress. Should their hold on the legislature slip, Democrats could stymie Trump\u2019s policy priorities for the last two years of his presidency \u2014 or even impeach him, as Trump himself has suggested.<\/p>\n
Polls have shown that the state of the economy remains the top issue ahead of the midterms.<\/p>\n
But how voters perceive each party\u2019s ability to address economic strain has shifted. Before the start of Trump\u2019s second term, the Pew Research Center found that voters were more likely to favour Republican policies on the economy.<\/p>\n
In July, however, the dynamic had switched: Thirty-seven percent of those surveyed backed the Democratic approach to the economy, compared with 36 percent for Republicans.<\/p>\n
Another poll this month from the news agency Reuters and the firm Ipsos likewise found slightly more respondents siding with the Democrats on economic policy than Republicans, upending a longtime trend that stretched back to 2017.<\/p>\n
Trump, for his part, has publicly appeared to dismiss cost-of-living issues as a partisan invention, calling questions of affordability a \u201choax\u201d and a \u201ccon job\u201d engineered by Democrats.<\/p>\n
At Friday\u2019s speech, Vance took a different approach, trying to assuage concerns about the administration\u2019s handling of the economy.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe got a lot of work to do, but we\u2019re making progress on all the things that matter the most,\u201d Vance said, citing efforts to make homeownership more affordable.<\/p>\n
The speech is part of an intensifying campaign under Trump to boost the prospects of Republican candidates ahead of the midterms, with the president and other top officials holding rallies for their party\u2019s candidates.<\/p>\n
Ohio, part of a historic manufacturing region known as the Rust Belt, has become increasingly conservative since Trump\u2019s first White House victory in 2016.<\/p>\n
But amid rising dissatisfaction with Republican leadership, Democrats see a chance to win back the state\u2019s governor\u2019s office, as well as the US Senate seat left vacant when Vance became vice president.<\/p>\n
Whoever wins the special election in November will serve the remainder of Vance\u2019s Senate term, which would have ended in January 2029.<\/p>\n
The Republican nominee in the race, Senator Jon Husted, joined Vance on stage at the Middletown rally on Friday. Husted was appointed to fill Vance\u2019s Senate seat until a special election could be held.<\/p>\n
Vance, for his part, dedicated part of his speech to attacking Husted\u2019s Democratic rival, former Senator Sherrod Brown, who lost his re-election race to Republican Bernie Moreno two years ago.<\/p>\n
He accused Brown of being among the politicians \u201cwho pretend to be friends of the workers in this facility\u201d, while instead advancing their own priorities.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard to understand what these modern Democrats actually stand for,\u201d Vance said, characterising the party as having strayed from its ideals.<\/p>\n
He pointed to Brown\u2019s record of siding with the policies of former Democratic President Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in the 2020 presidential race.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Brown] was a man who claimed to represent this state but never once raised his voice against Joe Biden\u2019s border crisis or against the inflation that was brought on by Joe Biden underinvesting and trying to destroy American industry,\u201d Vance said.<\/p>\n
The vice president also singled out Michigan\u2019s Abdul El-Sayed, repeating a false claim that the Democratic Senate candidate called for \u201cSharia law\u201d in the US.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d love to go back in time and tell my papaw that there\u2019s a man who claims to stand for working people, who says not only should we have Sharia law, but if you criticise it, you are a white supremacist,\u201d Vance said about El-Sayed.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s approval rating currently sits at 33 percent, according to Reuters-Ipsos polling from this month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the first time since becoming vice president of the United States, JD Vance has returned to his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":821546,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,4868,12,101,1070,2420,3,111,21,19,22,20,25,1209,256475,24],"class_list":["post-821545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-business-and-economy","tag-donald-trump","tag-economy","tag-elections","tag-government","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-us-canada","tag-us-midterm-elections-2026","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=821545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/821546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=821545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=821545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=821545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}