Vice President J.D. Vance campaigned with Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) and Republican candidate for Governor Vivek Ramaswamy at Middletown Works steel factory in Middletown, Ohio on Aug. 21, carried President Donald Trump’s message on trade, immigration, law and order into the 2026 Congressional midterms, where Husted faces a tough challenge from former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who lost narrowly to Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) in 2024.
Here, Vance is trying to shore up the coalition that got Trump elected in the first place in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that Trump won in 2016 and 2024, making the Electoral College decisive in his favor against Hillary Clinton and former Vice President Kamala Harris.
And in a state where he won handily by 11 points over Harris in 2024, 55 percent to 44 percent, but Sen. Moreno only beat former Sen. Brown by 3.5 points, 50 percent to 46.5 percent.
In a midterm election, there’s no such thing as a safe seat. Usually turnout will be boosted among the opposition party, in this case, the Democrats — meaning Sen. Husted has his work cut out for him. The last poll taken by Fox News take Aug. 6 to Aug. 10 had Brown leading Husted, 53 percent to 45 percent. Husted could absolutely lose such a race. Any Republican could. He needs all the help he can get.
Appearing in front of factory workers holding signs stating “Defend Our Future” and “Invest In America”, Vice President Vance declared, “I’m here with a message from the president of these United States. The future of America, the future of the United States, the future of our homes and communities is going to be built right here in Middletown, Ohio. My Papaw hated the politicians who ignored this place. He hated the people who saw this as the place of the past. He hated the people who forgot about this town when they should have been fighting for this town.”
Vance blasted the deindustrialization, the imported labor and outsourcing of manufacturing that devastated the Rust Belt, blaming both parties: “And the unfortunate reality is that they came from both political parties. And they spent the last 40 years telling you it didn’t matter if we made things right here or whether we made them in overseas countries. They said it was irrational, sentimental, old-fashioned to want to preserve the things that make the United States of America special. What we really needed, they said, was to compete and have complete market integration with every nation of the Third World. Places where you could pay wages at pennies on the dollar, but didn’t have to give your workers health care or good benefits in the process. And anytime somebody dared to put an obstacle in front of that set of ideas, anytime they said, you know what, we need to put tariffs or tough immigration policies to stop that. Those people were called backwards. They were called wrong.”
Vance called it a deliberate choice by elected officials, but that there was also a choice by the American people to reverse it by electing President Trump: “just as it was a policy choice to let that happen, my friends, it was a policy choice to reverse that decline. And in November of 2024, you made a choice to reverse 40 years of American decline and make Donald Trump the president of the United States.”
Vance reminded Ohioans that Democrats have not answered the President’s call to put America first on trade and immigration: “[A]s much as I wish we had, we have not gotten a lot of help from Democrats in Washington… No. This is not unfortunately JFK or FDR’s Democrat party. Hell, it’s not even Bill Clinton’s Democrat party. This is the party of diversity quotas rather than opportunity for all. This is the party, the Democrat party of graduate students rather than the union and non-union workers who make this facility run.”
And Vance criticized how supposedly pro-union and pro-worker Democrats have treated American workers and made a statement about the need for border security, law and order, an orderly immigration system and an emphasis on training and hiring American workers, saying how President Trump’s immigration and trade agenda fulfill the promise to working Americans who were critical to the Trump wins in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016 and 2024, alluding to New Deal Democrat Huey Long’s campaign slogan, “every man a king”: “Every man a king’ was the goal of [Huey Long’s] political program. But no man is a king if their castle is under siege by criminals. No man is a king if they can’t take their family out to dinner without being mugged or having their car jacked. And of course, ending the Biden border invasion was a big part of why we have changed that over the last 18 months. For four years, the Democrats invited millions of illegal immigrants into this country to take over our communities and compete with us for jobs and housing. They let in murderers. They let in gang leaders. They let in fraudsters. And they let in drug traffickers. And they did so by the tens of thousands.”
But, all it took was a real president to turn it around: “And for months, we heard Democrats, including people like Sherrod Brown, people who pretend to be the friends of the workers in this facility, saying that they couldn’t do anything to fix it. That we needed a new law. We needed a new statute. We needed Congress to pass a new regulation in order to fix Joe Biden’s open border. But as we’ve learned over the past 18 months, it didn’t require a new law to close down that border. It just required a new U.S. president.”
Vance added, “And what we did is we told American corporations that if you wanted new workers, you got to start by training and hiring your own countrymen. And we rewarded the corporations like Cleveland Cliffs that wanted to do that. And we were willing to tell the corporations that wanted to hire foreign labor that if you wanted to bring that stuff back into the United States, you were going to pay a big fat tariff for doing so. And so, for the first time in my life, America saw net migration out of the country as we sent millions of illegal immigrants back home.”
For even daring to refer to Huey Long, the Vice President has received conservative criticism in some quarters. But they’re not the intended audience. Instead, Vance is speaking to the working-class households in Ohio, saying even if your goal is the progressive “every man a king” you’ll never get there with open borders and foreign workers. That’s a shot at former Sen. Brown and any other open borders Democrats and Republicans.
Is Ohio a red state? Or a state where blue collar households are the kingmakers?
In the 1980s these were called Reagan Democrats. Now they’re Trump Democrats. What we don’t know is if they’re Husted Democrats, but Republicans have never won statewide in Ohio without that contingent of swing voters. Here, Vance is telling those voters their standards of living will not improve with the flood of foreign workers Brown and Democrats want to bring in.
You think it’s a red state — until it isn’t — forgetting that in 2008 and 2012, former President Barack Obama carried Ohio twice. The fact is, Sen. Husted is in an extremely tough race against former Sen. Brown. Everyone has forgotten that before the Trump era, Ohio was a swing state. This is an appeal to blue collar households in Ohio who Senator Husted is at risk of losing to former Senator Brown.
Those blasting Vance’s remarks are not even touching the substance of his statement about border security and protecting American workers from foreign workers. Instead, they appear visibly offended that Vance is even reaching out to the very blue collar households that make up the Trump coalition in the Rust Belt.
Independent Institute economic historian Phil Magness on X.com blasted Vance and his supporters that want to continue the Trump trade agenda, pointing to 2028 GOP presidential nomination polling and sarcastically posting, “We must coronate Vance and enact a postliberal agenda of tariffs, industrial subsidies, dollar devaluation, and economic isolationism…”
This is with all eyes on 2028. Ohio and the midterms be damned. It’s an attack on the electoral coalition and the trade and immigration message that won the Rust Belt for President Trump twice in the first place. The goal is to make sure that never happens again, as Vance, with his 2028 decision to run for president or not looming, would continue those policies that defend America’s physical and economic borders — and to boost American manufacturing for national security production in the event of war.
That, even though tariffs and trade protection more broadly are definitely pre-liberal. Even Adam Smith, often regarded as the first liberal thinker, while critical of certain kinds of tariffs, supported national defense tariffs in 1776’s Wealth of Nations: “it will generally be advantageous to lay some burden upon foreign, for the encouragement of domestic industry… when some particular sort of industry is necessary for the defence of the country.”
Congress has enacted laws to that effect, including Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, to protect manufacturing of automobiles for example which in World War II the factories were converted to support production of armaments, aircraft, tanks and trucks.
In the age of AI, chip production (particularly those used in hi-tech air, space, land and naval forces) almost certainly falls in that category, as does sourcing rare earth minerals and so forth.
In any event, calling tariffs and other trade protection post-liberal is anachronistic, as they clearly predate liberalism. And in the case of national security tariffs, Smith, the most prominent early liberal thinker, permitted them, so they fit inside the classical liberal tradition rather than outside of it.
Regardless of what Vance decides to do in 2028, what has been out of the mainstream are open borders for trade and immigration. That’s why George H.W. Bush lost in 1992 on the heels of the North American Free Trade Agreement — Ross Perot took those voters with him for a time — and that’s what Ohio and the rest of the Rust Belt reminded America and the world in 2016 and 2024 when they elected President Trump. Have Republicans already forgotten?
Robert Romano is the Executive Director of Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
