Ohio Senator JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, rejected the attack on the story coming from Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who was reportedly on Vice President Kamala Harris’ short list of possible running mates.
Beshear, a Democrat, appeared on MSNBC Morning Joe days after Harris announced his bid for president. The Kentuckian gave the vice president his endorsement, adding that he wanted “the American people to know what a Kentuckian is and what he looks like. Because I just told him that JD Vance is not from here.”
Vance – who was born in Middletown, Ohio, but has family from eastern Kentucky – returns to Beshear, the scion of a Kentucky political family and the son of a former governor.
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“Eastern Kentucky always has a special place in my heart,” Vance said, according to a report from Politico’s Meridith McGraw Monday. “It’s strange that someone who first worked in his father’s law firm and inherited the governorship from his father is criticizing my origin story.”
Beshear then doubled down on his comments while speaking with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins later that evening, repeating the senator, “He’s not from here.”
“He is not from Kentucky. So this is a person who will come in the summer for a while, or for a wedding or a funeral. Then he claims to be from eastern Kentucky, trying to write a book about it for profit. our people, then they call us lazy,” said Beshear, referring to Vance’s bestselling memoir, Elegy Hillbilly, which has received criticism for pushing stereotypes about the Appalachia region.
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Beshear said it was “complimentary” to put in the speculation about Harris’s vice-presidential pick. On Monday night, the governor told CNN he had not been “personally requested” to send any information for “vetting purposes” to the vice presidential campaign.
Other Democrats rumored to be Harris’ pick for vice president include Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. As a former California senator and attorney general with roots in San Francisco, Harris is likely to find a partner who will help him regain momentum in the swing state, which in the past few weeks has begun to turn in favor of former President Donald Trump.
Beshear was first elected governor of Kentucky in 2019, just three years after Trump won the state by nearly 30 percentage points in the 2016 presidential election. Beshear was re-elected in 2023 and Trump won the state by about 25 points three years before the 2020 presidential election.
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Vance, who was elected to the Senate in 2022 along with the endorsement of Trump, rose to prominence after his launch. Elegy Hillbilly memoir in 2016. He wrote a book as a reflection on white, what class America is, and has received praise from some conservatives. It was also remade into a movie in 2020.
Some have criticized the senator’s work for pushing stereotypes about the Appalachia region, which includes parts of eastern Ohio and Kentucky. In one section, Vance appears to blame the “hillbilly” culture as the reason for the struggles he was surrounded by growing up, writing, “We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs. Sometimes we’ll get jobs, but they won’t last… We talk about the value of hard work but say the reason we can’t do it is because it’s unfair: Obama closed the coal mines, or all the jobs go to the Chinese lies we tell to overcome cognitive dissonance – the broken relationship between the world we see and the values- the value it preaches.”
Vance’s hometown is in southwestern Ohio and not part of Appalachia. His grandfather and his family, however, who Vance said took a lot of time, are from Jackson, Kentucky, according to reports from Cincinnati Enquirer.
The Ohio senator played up his ties to the Midwest working class during his first solo campaign event at a former high school in Middletown, Ohio, on Monday. He promised supporters at the event, “You’re going to see more and more products stamped with that beautiful logo: ‘Made in the USA.'”
“Who is sick of sending America’s sons and daughters to foreign countries where they have no business?” Vance added to the speech, according to an Associated Press report on the rally.
Beshear said on CNN Monday afternoon that he was “infuriated” when Vance said he had roots in Appalachia, “but it especially made me angry with people in eastern Kentucky.”
“Listen, these are hard-working coal miners who fueled the Industrial Revolution, who helped build the strongest middle class in the world, helped us win two world wars, and they call him lazy, act like he knows our culture and he’s wrong one of us,” Beshear said. “He didn’t.”
An email was sent to the Vance campaign and Beshear’s office late Monday night for additional comment.
Update 07/22/24, 11:38 pm ET: This article has been updated with additional information and background.
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