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

While Mandel was the most vocal Big Lie candidate in Ohio’s GOP Senate primary, J.D. Vance didn’t shy away from Trumpian claims either. He’s called Biden a “crazy, fake president” and said at a debate last month that he believed the 2020 election was stolen.

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.