Perhaps the most notable soundbite to emerge from Sen. JD Vance’s first solo rally since becoming former President Donald Trump’s running mate was a joke about Diet Mountain Dew.
The Ohio senator made the remarks as he discussed voter ID laws, saying that it was the “weirdest thing to me” to say that those laws are racist.
“Well, they say it’s racist to do anything,” Vance said. “I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday, and one today. I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.”
Vance was apparently met by laughter in the audience at the Middletown, Ohio rally, prompted him to laugh as well.
It’s not the first time that he’s made light of racism for political benefit. During his 2022 Senate bid, Vance released an ad in which he asked the viewer, in a deadpan fashion, whether they were racist and “hate Mexicans.”
Yet the Ohio senator once took the issue of racism far more seriously, according to his 2016 bestselling autobiography “Hillbilly Elegy.”
“I’ve worried about racial prejudice in my own family and friends,” Vance wrote toward the end of that book, describing some of the anxieties and adjustments that had come with his upward mobility.
He would later describe a specific instance of the racism he professed to be worried about: His extended family members’ reaction to his cousin Gail becoming pregnant.
“Almost immediately, her life began to disintegrate,” Vance wrote. “Racial prejudice bubbled to the surface when she announced that a black baby was joining the family. Announcements led to arguments, and then one day Gail found herself without a family.”
As he promoted the book in 2016, Vance made the case that while Trump’s voters were likely motivated by race — “The Trump people are certainly more racist than the average white professional,” he told POLITICO that year — it would be reductive, and potentially perilous, to simply dismiss the former president’s voters as racist.
“People listen to what their political leaders are telling them, and my view is both that Trump is tapping into some racially ugly attitudes, but also that he is leading people to racially ugly attitudes,” Vance told Slate in 2016. “I think that the left has a role to play here because I think if you look at these communities and you say, the only thing that’s going on here is that they’re racially resentful and they’re finally getting the candidate who reflects their racism, I think you’re going to push people further away.”
More broadly, Vance in his book frequently compared the experience of white working class people — particularly the Appalachian-descended “hillbillies” that made up his family and broader community — to the experience of Black communities in urban environments.
“To many analysts, terms like ‘welfare queen’ conjure unfair images of the lazy black mom living on the dole,” Vance wrote. “Readers of this book will realize quickly that there is little relationship between that specter and my argument: I have known many welfare queens; some were my neighbors, and all were white.”
He also criticized family members who made racially insensitive remarks, characterizing it as part of a self-defeating cultural pathology that was rampant among his family and friends.
“When he found out that I had decided to go to Yale Law, he asked whether, on my applications, I had ‘pretended to be black or liberal.’ This is how low the cultural expectations of working-class white Americans have fallen,” Vance wrote, referring to his father.
It goes without saying that the Ohio senator’s opinions have since changed — not just on Trump, but with regard to American politics more broadly.
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