Vice President JD Vance returned to his hometown on Friday to campaign for Republican candidates at the steel plant where his grandfather worked and portray the Democratic Party his Papaw once supported as unrecognizable today.
Vance has highlighted his Rust Belt roots while trying to boost GOP candidates ahead of the November midterm elections. He has focused on promoting the Trump administration’s economic policies and efforts to try to expand U.S. manufacturing.
As he took the stage at the Cleveland-Cliffs Middletown Works facility, known as Armco Steel when his grandfather James Vance worked there for nearly 40 years, he remarked on sharing the space where the man whose name he shared once stood.
“Papaw was a welder in this place for 40 years, and today his grandson stands here as the vice president of these United States. It’s an amazing thing,” Vance said.
The Middletown event comes as Vance is expected to ramp up his travel schedule with more public events and fundraisers, according to a person familiar with the plans who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
As they’ve campaigned this year, Vance, more than President Donald Trump, has acknowledged Americans’ cost-of-living concerns, seeking to assure voters that the administration is working to reverse high prices, though he didn’t offer specifics.
The vice president said, “We’ve got a lot of work to do” and “I’m not saying it’s going to be easy or it’s all going to happen overnight,” but he said Trump was trying to reverse “40 years of American decline.” He pointed to Trump’s immigration and trade policies, including his tariffs, as trying to protect jobs like those at the steel plant.
Trump’s tariff policies, though, have contributed to the higher costs Americans are facing, as taxes on imports have raised the price of imported products as well as those made domestically, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
