Tim Ryan

If conservatives interpreted Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 the way Trump supporters are being told to interpret the 2022 midterms, there would be no conservative movement today. Of course, the 1964 election was an actual defeat, while this year’s elections were an advance for the new Republican right, which succeeded in its first task — gaining power in the GOP — and has strengthened its hand in Congress. The right has picked up a Senate seat with Ohio’s J.D. Vance, and Republicans look likely to control the House of Representatives come January. The GOP won the majority of votes cast in House races, nearly 52 percent overall. The official narrative of the election is meant to drive the right to suicide.

Republican J.D. Vance wiped the floor with Democrat Tim Ryan on Tuesday night. It was a surprise for all the professional pundits only because the Ohio Senate race had been obscured by all kinds of white noise. The mainstream media worked overtime to paint the contest as a toss-up and the Democrats insisted they were going to flip the seat. Just a couple of weeks ahead of the election, multiple polls had the race at a statistical tie. Vance ended up winning by seven points. Several Republican consultants told me that they never believed the race would be close. Ohio, they pointed out, was ground zero for the working-class realignment that propelled Donald Trump to victory in 2016. Trump won the state again by eight points in the 2020 presidential election.

Tim Ryan is cunning. Facing an ultra-tight race against J.D. Vance for Ohio’s US Senate seat, Ryan is hedging his bets by running as a Republican on the Democratic ticket. Ryan strikes me as willing to do and say whatever it takes to win — more so even than your average career politician (he is 49 years old, has served in the US House since 2003 and was in the Ohio State Senate before that). Lately, in an attempt to appear “moderate,” Ryan has been adopting Republican talking points and throwing his own party under the bus. But a trip down memory lane shows Ryan for what he really is: someone who voted “with President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi 100 percent of the time this Congress,” and only voted in line with President Trump 16 percent of the time.

Has Tim Ryan thrown in the towel? The Democratic candidate for Senate in Ohio won’t know the final outcome in his bout with J.D. Vance for another week. So why, Cockburn asks, does he give off the downtrodden vibe of a man locked in a custody battle? “I’m at my wits’ end. I don’t know what else I can say,” the congressman tweeted yesterday evening, presumably with a shotgun to his chin. “If we don’t meet our final end-of-month fundraising deadline tonight, we risk losing this race — and Ohio could fall off the map.” Cockburn wonders how neighboring Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia would feel about Ohio falling off the map. Extending Lake Erie southward a few hundred miles could offer some lucrative real estate opportunities.

Cockburn loves campaign gossip, and the latest gossipy article from the Daily Beast does little to inspire confidence in Ohio GOP Senate hopeful J.D. Vance. Last week, Vance made a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Israel, which is pretty far from his home state in the Midwest. And apparently the fact that he wasn't campaigning in the Buckeye State has ticked off more than a few Ohioans. This isn’t the first of Vance’s abandonment issues. He’s been missing from Ohio speaking events and conferences, and even ghosted some of his donors according to the Beast’s source in the GOP. This comes a few days after the Beast posted about Vance’s finance issues, stating plainly in the very first line that “The J.D. Vance Campaign is broke.