Residents of Vice President JD Vance’s hometown in Ohio have mixed feelings about the city’s most famous native son.
The 41-year-old Vance detailed his troubled upbringing in Middletown, where globalization hollowed out its industrial core and chased off good-paying jobs, in his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” and Washington Post columnist Carine Hajjar found the folks back home never quite embraced him as one of their own.
“I’m kind of embarrassed sometimes to tell people that I’m from Middletown,” said Bethany Tompkins, a mother and seamstress. “I don’t want the world to judge us by him and how he behaves.”
Hajjar was surprised how little fanfare about the local product she spotted around town during a recent visit, just over a year after he was elected to serve as President Donald Trump’s second in command.
“There were no banners, no plaques, not even a weather-beaten Trump-Vance ’24 sign as I drove around town,” she wrote. “[A] portrait of Vance [in an art studio] was the most visible display of admiration I found. Though Middletown, like surrounding Butler County, went 62 percent for the Republican ticket, turnout in Middletown was nine points lower than the county as a whole. And in the 2022 Senate race, without Trump on the ticket, Vance carried Butler by a smaller margin than the rest of the statewide Republican winners.”
The painter of that Vance portrait, David Bailey, offered as much praise for him as anyone Hajjar encountered.
“I thought it was pretty neat, we got a local guy from Middletown, Ohio,” Bailey told her. “That’s something I think is worthy of notoriety.”
Middletown’s city council placed a handful of signs acknowledging Vance around town after his mother asked a month after his election, reminding elected officials that he had graduated from the local high school and still returns sometimes to take her out to dinner, but Hajjar said those displays were fairly inconspicuous.
“We don’t name a lot of things after people around here,” said Butler County treasurer Michael McNamara, but he added that doesn’t mean locals aren’t proud. “I mean, to be able to produce a vice president or potential future president is a pretty incredible feather in your cap.”
Trump promised on the campaign trail that his trade policies and immigration crackdown would boost fortunes in places like Middletown, but manufacturing jobs remain down and prices are still high 11 months into his second term, and Vance is preaching patience while promising an economic “boom” is just around the corner.
“Middletown residents are just as conflicted about the prospect of a boom as they are about the local man delivering the message,” Hajjar wrote.
Fred Couch, a bartender in a local pizza parlor, told the columnist he backed Vance as a senator but had since lost faith in his leadership due to Trump’s trade war.
“I think tariffs are a tax, myself, and it’s done nothing but hurt people so far,” Couch said.
The city’s economic challenges are older than Vance and will most likely outlive his tenure as vice president, but locals like 60-year-old Wilma Smith recall a golden age back in the 1970s, before the factories closed down and online shopping upended retail shopping.
“I met a lot of residents like Smith who could remember better days, but didn’t see it as Vance’s job alone to save Middletown from decades of decline,” Hajjar wrote. “Besides, Smith said, it ‘made my day’ when she found out that Vance was a local kid. ‘It gives us a boost, too,’ she said. ‘We need that boost, you know.’”
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