Can These Notorious Libertarians Buy Themselves a Senate Seat in Ohio?

Peter Thiel

Politicos perked up when Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder, donated $10 million last month to a super PAC seeking to recruit author J.D. Vance to run for the Republican Senate nomination in Ohio, for the seat that Rob Portman is giving up. Peter Thiel has a big, actually abusive Libertarian reputation, and really so does J.D. Vance, the author of the best-seller Hillbilly Elegy, who hasn't even said definitely that he's running.

Why would Thiel be so enthusiastic about Vance? The super PAC that's trying to recruit Vance calls itself "Protect Ohio Values," a phrase out of sync with the ambitions of a man like Thiel, for whom nothing seems sacred and who clearly thinks of other people as a problem to be solved -- or evaded. He's built himself a sprawling luxury compound in New Zealand as a refuge for himself and other like-minded Libertarians when there's a collapse of civilization in the United States. (I can recommend Mark O'Connell's "Notes From the Apocolypse," which includes a chapter on Thiel.) Thiel also helped found the spy world's ideal Big Eye, the Palantir company, which hacks "big data analytics," bigger and better than Cambridge Analytics of Steve Bannon fame. But Ohio values?

So the name of that super PAC backing a Senate candidacy for J.D. Vance is camouflage for something else, something not at all sinister, I'm sure.

Vance himself wrote his best seller about growing up poor and white in Appalachia and getting all the way to Yale Law School as an up-by-the-bootstraps saga of personal triumph against great odds. He sold the book to the movies, and now Glenn Close is nominated for an Academy Award. The movie was loudly panned as stereotype-strangled claptrap. David Sims called it "the worst movie of the year" in The Atlantic.

J.D. Vance

The book the preceded it, however, made Vance the go-to oracle not only of modern Appalachia but also of the rural, white, economically struggling "Trump voter." Vance was in the media multiple times explaining, for example, why/how Trump had won Pennsylvania and Michigan. White resentment, what historian Bob Hutton called "sado-nationalism," got fully flowered because of decades of the liberal welfare system, hatred for which the Trump presidency provided full justification. Vance himself was an enthusiastic Trump supporter (as was Thiel, at least in 2016), both attracted to the norm-shattering populism of an otherwise ignorant and cunning con-man.

Despite its best-sellerdom and the wide respect Vance earned as a writer of words, Hillbilly Elegy was the most hated book of 2016 among the regional activists and scholars I know and pay attention to. An entire book of Vance denunciation, "Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy," was published by West Virginia University Press in 2019. The essays, one and all, found Vance to be not only "clueless" about the diversity of life in Appalachia but dangerously clueless, peddling “a media-constructed mythological realm, backward and homogenous,” "full of Scots-Irish hillbilly welfare queens and kings too lazy to work who spend most of their time drinking moonshine and getting high on opioids" (1st quote, Dwight Billings, filtered through the reviewer James Branscome in the 2nd quote).

I have little doubt that Vance will be running for that Senate seat and that Thiel knows it. Vance will have a primary -- already, two other Republicans, both avid Trumpists vying for an endorsement from he who was formerly known as Twitterman, have announced their candidacies. I'll get around to profiling all those candidates, and the Democrats, eventually. But right now I just want to marvel at what our broken political finance system and the continuing evil of Citizens United can potentially do to our Republic.

Democrats Have (Almost) Every Reason to Rejoice About Last Night

The special election in the Ohio 12th Congressional District hasn't been called yet. Republican Troy Balderson is 1,754 votes ahead of Democrat Danny O'Connor, but there are still "possibly as many as 8,483 additional ballots" yet to be counted, provisional ballots and mail-in ballots from overseas. So it ain't over, and O'Connor hasn't conceded.

Even if O'Connor still loses, it's a win, O my brethren, more evidence of the blue wave building, because the Ohio 12th was gerrymandered to be a solid, deep-red Republican district.

The big city of Columbus occupies most of Franklin County, but the district was drawn to take in none of its urban core but only the (formerly) safe Republican suburbs, which are precisely the precincts that made O'Connor so competitive. The rest of the district is mainly rural Twitterman country, and we'll find out soon enough that Republican performance in those counties was way down from 2016.

To repeat what you probably already know -- Twitterman won the 12th by 11 points in 2016. The seat has been held by Republicans since 1983. GOP Rep. Patrick J. Tiberi won the district by 37 points in 2016.

Despite what ultimately happens here, both O'Connor and Balderson will have a rematch this November. You can certainly expect Corporal Bonespurs to make a return rally engagement, since he likes getting his ego greased.

Shortly before midnight last night, Mike DeBonis published this duh observation: "Democrats are routinely beating their 2016 performance by double digits — putting the House and perhaps even the Senate within their grasp in November." I repeat: duh.

Watch This One on August 7

Danny O'Connor in red shirt, canvassing.
Photo Maddie McGarvey, for the NYTimes

The 12th Congressional District of Ohio hasn't elected a Democrat since 1980.

A special election there for the US Congress is now rated a tossup by the Cook Political Report. The Democrat, Danny O'Connor, could be the next indication that the 2018 blue wave ain't no mirage.

Apparently, Democratic turn-out in early voting in heavily Republican areas bodes well. Early voting numbers always signal political energy -- who has the edge, which team can't wait to get in the game?

The Republican candidate for the open seat tries to paint O'Connor as a puppet of Nancy Pelosi, which hardly works at all any more, especially since O'Connor has already announced that he won't be voting for Pelosi as Speaker, should the Dems take control of the House.

This Man Wants To Be a US Senator

He says the president was just saying what people -- including Rep. Jim Renacci, presumably -- are thinking, and we shouldn't judge the president on what he says.

I am judging, and history is judging, the immoral fool sitting in the White House. He's a fucking racist and always has been.

And I tend to believe that Rep. Jim Renacci, who says Trump called him recently to urge him to run for Senate from Ohio, is proud to defend Trump because he agrees with Trump's racist views but would never utter them out loud.