COLUMBUS, Ohio—Republican J.D. Vance defeated Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan in Ohio’s Senate race Tuesday night, sending another ally of tech billionaire Peter Thiel to Washington.
Vance’s victory keeps the seat under the GOP column, replacing retiring Sen. Rob Portman.
Inside the Ohio Republican “victory party,” at the Renaissance Hotel in downtown Columbus, the mood shifted from upbeat to celebratory as it became clear Vance would win.
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Shortly after Ryan called Vance to concede, the ballroom filled back up as attendees began to celebrate in earnest.
“I’m not surprised at all,” Colin Finn, a law student at The Ohio State University, told The Daily Beast. “I knew from the very beginning that the mainstream media narratives about J.D. not being in the state, running the campaign online, weren’t true.”
Vance took the stage with his extended family to raucous applause, joined by his mother, Bev, who was played by Amy Adams in the movie version of A Hillbilly Elegy, his bestselling 2016 book.
He joked that his youngest children were “upstairs, asleep,” with no idea what was going on.
“We’re gonna see what happens across the country… Here’s the thing, we’ve been given the opportunity to do something, and that’s to govern,” Vance said, thanking supporters and staffers by name at length.
He also called Ryan “gracious” in his phone call, a rare moment of magnanimity in a race that turned ugly.
While Ryan kept the race tight late in the campaign, Vance’s victory reinforced Ohio’s status as more of a red state than a swing state. Former President Donald Trump carried the Buckeye State by around 8 points in both 2016 and 2020.
Chandler Wysocki, a 24-year-old state Senate candidate who lost on Tuesday night, said he admired how Vance handled the media climate in the race.
Vance had to introduce himself to most of the Ohio electorate, only coming onto the scene as a public figure since publishing A Hillbilly Elegy.
A Yale Law School graduate with experience in venture capital, Vance railed against political correctness and elites in a highly Trumpian campaign. He campaigned on economic nationalism and heavily emphasized inflation, crime, and immigration as his top three issues.
Vance dodged questions on whether he’d support a national ban on abortion before saying he’d support it a month and-a-half later.
"We should not, in this country, be aborting babies who can feel pain, who are fully formed. That's my view, and I'm certainly willing to support legislation that would make that a reality," Vance said during a Fox News town hall.
Vance will join Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri as the latest Thiel protégé on Capitol Hill, although money became an issue in the middle of the campaign when the candidate’s chief benefactor held out on another cash infusion.
Thiel, a skeptic of college education and a proponent of a theory that truly successful businesses can only be monopolies, has donated millions of dollars to outside groups supporting his favored candidates.
