What Went Down During Ohio’s And Indiana’s Primary Elections

One guy who has to be pretty happy tonight is Peter Thiel, the billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur who bankrolled Vance’s run in Ohio to the tune of $13.5 million. That’s about five times what Vance’s campaign spent. Thiel is making some big plays in politics lately, and he has another candidate, Blake Masters, in the Arizona Senate primary. Trump hasn’t endorsed in that primary yet, but he recently made a virtual appearance at a Masters event. Tonight’s big win by Vance could work in Masters’s favor, but that primary isn’t until August.

I know some election-watchers have felt that Vance’s positions during the Ohio Senate race were a change from his persona as the “Hillbilly Elegy” author, but I always thought the book contained a lot of anti-government sentiment, especially against government programs, and a lot of the rural resentment that Katherine J. Cramer studied. It never seemed a turn to me, just a predictable evolution.

In Ohio’s Republican Senate primary, ABC News has projected that J.D. Vance will win, putting him on a collision course with Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan in the general election. Vance leads his race with 31 percent, about 7 points ahead of Josh Mandel. Vance earned Trump’s endorsement during the primary, and he will be favored to win in November in a GOP-leaning state.

Where things stand in Ohio’s GOP primary for Senate