(PJ Media) I wasn’t sure what to expect in the debate between Democrat Rep. Tim Ryan and political newcomer J.D. Vance in the campaign for the open Senate seat in Ohio. Ryan, who has been in Congress for nearly 20 years, has decades of debates under his belt, so I wondered if Vance would be able to keep up. I needn’t have worried.
Not only was Vance well prepared for the debate, but he landed blow after blow after blow against Ryan, portraying him as an out-of-touch liberal who takes his marching order from the radical left—at the expense of his constituents in the state’s Rust Belt. Ryan was stiff and angry and focused on personal attacks—always a sign of a candidate who believes he’s losing.
The debate, which was hosted by Fox 8 in Cleveland, included questions about hot-button issues roiling the nation, including abortion, immigration, border security, and the fentanyl epidemic. The moderators asked Vance about the claim by his opponent that he was a Silicon Valley “vulture capitalist” who is out of touch with the needs of ordinary Ohioans.
“I was born and raised in the state, and the reason I left when I was 18 was to enlist in the United States Marine Corps,” Vance replied. “That was the first time I ever left the state of Ohio. I went to Ohio State University. I started a business here, I raised my three small children here.” Then, in what would become a pattern in Vance’s stellar debate performance, he turned the question around on Ryan: “This is a ridiculous accusation from a guy, by the way, 20 years in Washington, who has never actually had to employ people and has never actually created a single job.” He pointed out that Ryan represents a congressional district that has lost 50,000 jobs… Those of us who create jobs know what it’s like when you have bad policies, and we know what it’s like when you have good policies.”
Ryan responded by attacking Vance’s donors and accusing him of hiring foreign workers: “You think we’re stupid, J.D., and we’re not. I’m just telling you that you are from Silicon Valley. You don’t understand what’s going on here in Ohio… Now you want to parachute into Ohio, and you want to try to buy a Senate seat. It’s not gonna work because everybody can sniff it out.”
On the abortion question, Ryan tried to paint Vance as a dangerous extremist, accusing him of advocating for “state-mandated pregnancies,” even for ten-year-old rape victims.
“I mean, look, I’ve got a nine-year-old baby girl at home,” Vance said. “I cannot imagine what that’s like for the girl or her family. God forbid something that like that would happen. I’ve said repeatedly, on the record, that I think that that girl should be able to get an abortion if she and her family so choose to do so.” Again, he turned the question around on Ryan with a searing response. “Why was a 10-year-old girl raped in our community, right in our state, in the first place. The thing is that the media and Congressman Ryan will talk about this all the time.
The thing they never mention is that the poor girl was raped by an illegal alien, somebody that should have never been in this state in the first place. You voted so many times against border wall funding, so many times for amnesty. If you had done your job, she would have never been raped in the first place.”
Vance was asked whether he would support a bill sponsored by retiring Republican Sen. Rob Portman that would codify same-sex marriage in Ohio law. Vance rightly pointed out that the point of the bill had nothing to do with legalizing same-sex marriage. “I’ve come out against this bill, and I don’t think it’s actually about gay marriage,” he said. “It’s not about same-sex marriage or same-sex equality” but rather about persecuting religious Americans.
