US Vice President JD Vance holds midterm election rally in Ohio hometown

For the first time since becoming vice president of the United States, JD Vance has returned to his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, with a goal of rallying Republican voters ahead of November’s pivotal midterm elections. Vance delivered Friday’s speech at a symbolic location: the steel plant where his late grandfather once worked. He used the appearance to tout a $1bn investment from the steel manufacturer Cleveland-Cliffs that was supported by $500m in government awards.

That funding, he said, illustrated his party’s commitment to the manufacturing sector and reinvigorating the US economy overall. Vance’s speech comes at a critical time for the Republican Party and Trump in particular. November’s midterm races will decide whether Republicans are able to maintain control over both chambers of Congress.

Should their hold on the legislature slip, Democrats could stymie Trump’s policy priorities for the last two years of his presidency — or even impeach him, as Trump himself has suggested. Polls have shown that the state of the economy remains the top issue ahead of the midterms. But how voters perceive each party’s ability to address economic strain has shifted.

Before the start of Trump’s second term, the Pew Research Center found that voters were more likely to favour Republican policies on the economy. In July, however, the dynamic had switched: Thirty-seven percent of those surveyed backed the Democratic approach to the economy, compared to 36 percent for Republicans. A poll from the news agency and the firm Ipsos this month likewise found slightly more respondents siding with the Democrats on economic policy than Republicans, upending a longtime trend that stretched back to 2017.

Trump, for his part, has publicly appeared to dismiss cost-of-living issues as a partisan invention, calling questions of affordability a “hoax” and a “con job” engineered by Democrats. At Friday’s speech, Vance took a different approach, trying to assuage concerns about the administration’s handling of the economy. The speech is part of an intensifying campaign under Trump to boost the prospects of Republican candidates ahead of the midterms, with the president and other top officials holding rallies for their party’s candidates.

Ohio, part of a historic manufacturing region known as the Rust Belt, has become increasingly conservative since Trump’s first White House victory in 2016. But amid rising dissatisfaction with Republican leadership, Democrats see a chance to win back the state’s governor’s office, as well as the US Senate seat left vacant when Vance became vice president. Whoever wins the special election in November will serve the remainder of Vance’s erstwhile Senate term, which would have ended in 2028.