Ohio lawmaker: Vance ‘not good for Ohio’ and ‘not good for America’

Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) went after her fellow Ohioan and current Republican vice presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance, saying he “is not good for Ohio” in an interview Saturday.

“JD Vance is not good for Ohio, he’s not good for America, he doesn’t fight for the everyday people,” Beatty said on “The Katie Phang Show” on MSNBC. “He’s actually more than weird, he’s a joke.”

A recent ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll found more respondents seeing Vance’s Democratic counterpart, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), in a better light in comparison to Vance. Thirty-nine percent of respondents in the poll said they either have a “strongly” or “somewhat” positive view of the Minnesota governor, while 32 percent of the respondents said they either have a “strongly” or “somewhat” positive view of the Ohio senator.

“When you think about how he has gotten everything, from his jobs, to even getting this position, he was walked in the door by a mega-Republican tech billionaire,” Beatty said, possibly referring to billionaire Peter Thiel, whose venture capital firm Vance joined after law school and who also gave $15 million to a super PAC backing him in the 2022 midterms.

“So, things have been handed for him, unlike [Vice President] Kamala Harris, who’s had to fight for things all her life,” Beatty continued.

Vance and Walz are set to debate in early October, as both the Minnesota governor and the Ohio senator posted on social media this week that they had accepted the invitation for the event on CBS.

“The American people deserve as many debates as possible, which is why [former] President Trump has challenged Kamala to three of them already,” Vance said. “Not only do I accept the CBS debate on October 1st, I accept the CNN debate on September 18th as well. I look forward to seeing you at both!”

In an email to The Hill, a spokesperson for Vance said that he “grew up in poverty.”

“He had a tough childhood, an absent father, and a mother who struggled with drug addiction,” Luke Schroeder said. “After high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and served our country honorably for four years, including a tour in Iraq. Then he used the GI bill to go to Ohio State, earned a spot at Yale Law School, and went on to invest in companies which now support hundreds of jobs across Ohio and the Midwest. JD earned the American dream. For Rep. Beatty to claim he had things ‘handed to him’ is an insult to every working-class American who has struggled to overcome adversity.”