Inside JD Vance’s Hometown: A Warning Sign for Republicans

The wooden front door of JD Vance’s childhood home on McKinley Street in Middletown has endured decades of harsh Ohio winters. Snow and ice have split the porch boards, leaving them warped and weathered.

An American flag hangs over the entrance as autumn leaves begin to change along the street. From the road, the house appears as though someone still lives there.

But the property is vacant. A padlock secures the front door, and the rooms visible through the glass are empty. Behind the house, the porch is decaying and the grass has gone uncut.

This is the home where the vice president spent part of the childhood he later chronicled in Hillbilly Elegy, his bestselling memoir about growing up poor in a declining Rust Belt steel town.

Now that Vance is in the White House, the house stands empty. The place where he learned the realities of poverty has become too costly for the people who are struggling most.

Middletown’s median household income is approximately $57,000—more than $14,000 below Ohio’s median. About one in six residents lives beneath the poverty line.

Next door, Christina, 47, adds another plastic pumpkin to a front garden already crowded with Halloween decorations.

Christina ran a ghost-hunting business for 10 years and now says her century-old house is inhabited by the spirits of an elderly man and a maid. She has never felt a presence inside the Vance home. “Very stagnant, bland energy,” she said. “There’s too much pain in there for spirits.”

Neighbors say the last family to rent the Vance house was a young couple with a small daughter and a newborn son.

They stayed for roughly a year before the father lost his job and rising rent forced them out.

“They moved out about a month ago,” said Matt, 35, who has since returned to his parents’ home two doors away. “The management company kept raising the rent on all the houses they own around here. They just couldn’t afford it.”

Matt does not plan to vote on November 3—not for the GOP and not for anyone else.

“I try to stay away from the news. I don’t really understand it,” he said. “Honestly, I’m just not interested. It’s not like anything’s going to change, is it?”

That kind of resignation is precisely what Republicans cannot afford. Ohio, a state Donald Trump has carried comfortably three times, is beginning to slip away. The voters turning their backs are the same white, working-class men who helped deliver it to him. Many are struggling financially, deeply frustrated and increasingly unwilling to cast a ballot.

Even at a strip club 20 minutes north of Middletown, dancers say patrons have stopped discussing politics—and, more troublingly, have stopped tipping as generously as they once did.

Sherrod Brown, the veteran Democrat Ohio voters removed from the Senate two years ago, is now leading Republican Jon Husted in polling. A victory would return Brown to the Senate seat Vance vacated to become vice president. In the governor’s race, Vance ally Vivek Ramaswamy could also face defeat.

For Vance, the political consequences will become even greater after November 3.

If Republicans lose both a Senate seat and the governorship, Democrats will have a new foothold of power in a state that appeared to be off the map for them. If he launches a presidential bid, it will rest on Vance’s shoulders to rebuild the party’s coalition in a state no Republican has lost on the way to the White House.

And it’ll start in many of the towns like his home one.

A sign at the city limits announces this as ‘Middletown, Ohio: Hometown of JD Vance.’

Vance was last here in August, when he dropped into Central Pastry bakery before rallying steelworkers at the old Armco plant, now Cleveland-Cliffs, where his grandfather worked for nearly 40 years.

He has been back to Ohio twice since, rallying in Lima and outside Cincinnati. At the Cincinnati stop last week, a man posing as a supporter tossed down his MAGA hat and shouted ‘You protected pedophiles!’ before being led out. Vance joked that the man hadn’t washed his hair in three months.

Central Avenue, the town’s tired main drag, is quiet by day. Cars drive through constantly, but almost none of them stop.

On a Friday afternoon, the empty lots outnumbered the open shops. New businesses move in and are often gone within months.

At Central Pastry, the 78-year-old store Vance still drops into when he’s back in town, the owner adores him.

Vera, 81, came from Colombia by way of New York and has run Central Pastry for three decades. Her husband, who worked for Armco, the steel company that made Middletown, grew up on McKinley Street just like Vance. Vera remembers a little boy coming in with his grandmother. She didn’t know his name back then. 

‘It was his eyes,’ she said. ‘Years later I saw him at the Memorial Day parade, standing on his own… and I knew him straight away. Those eyes.’

When he comes in now, he insists on being called JD.

Last time he bought doughnuts he left a $40 tip and reminded the girls who work there that there’s no tax on tips anymore. Customers have been tipping big ever since. He signed a $2 bill for one of the bakery’s close-knit crew who collects them. She has it framed at home.

Vera is not convinced the town shares her affection. ‘A lot of people say he put things in that book that weren’t true,’ she said. ‘But he really came from nothing, and he made himself.’

Her staff think he’s slimming down for a run at the presidency. He turned down their doughnuts at his last rally.

Jennifer, who works the counter, went to that rally. She’ll vote on November 3, she said, but she’s ‘not as enthused’ because Trump and Vance aren’t on the ballot. Vance in 2028? ‘No hesitation.’

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Chris, 57, who helps run a ministry for the homeless, drips red, white and blue. He sports a long white beard, crucifixes are wrapped and stacked on his wrists and a cross emblazoned with a lion’s face on his T-shirt.

‘Drugs are bad here,’ Chris said. Half the people on the street, he figures, were sent here from the towns of Hamilton, Dayton and Columbus, because Middletown has shelters and the other towns don’t want them.

‘Everybody says go to Middletown, go to Middletown. We’re saturated.’

Chris knows the vice president’s mother, Bev Aikins, long in recovery, has spoken at his ministry’s events about her addiction and how it cost her the relationship with her children, a relationship she says has since been repaired.

The first time they met, about a year and a half ago, she was telling her story and let a few f-bombs fly with children in the room. Chris, a former youth pastor, stopped her.

‘I said, “Hey, we can’t have that,”‘ he recalled. ‘And I made the comment, you can put lipstick on a pig and it’s still a pig.’

People took it as him calling the vice president’s mother a pig. He insists he wasn’t.

‘It’s an awkward situation, arguing with the vice president’s mother, telling her to watch her mouth,’ he said. ‘Everybody got on me about it. But I walk to the beat of my own drum.’

Chris is less generous about her son. Asked whether life in Middletown has got any better with one of its own in the White House, he suggested Vance had left the town behind.

‘If I made that journey, I wouldn’t forget where I came from,’ he said. ‘And I’ll leave it at that.’

He’ll still vote Republican this time (‘This midterm isn’t about personality, it’s about protection’), but if Vance runs for president in 2028, he said, he ‘would have to prove himself.’

Walk through Vance’s hometown and you can tell who has beaten addiction and who is still fighting it. Men cheerfully recommend their favorite dive bar through battered teeth and bloodshot eyes.

On a porch just a few blocks from Vance’s old home, Jose, a migrant worker in the US on a five-year permit, knows exactly whose house is down the street. Immigration officers wait outside his job sites, he said, and don’t care that his papers are in order.

‘The streets are full of drugs,’ he said. ‘But nowadays they’re not worried about drugs. They’re only worried about us.’

As the sun goes down, Central Avenue changes. The addicts come out of the shadows and light up. The homeless stream in, pushing shopping carts.

The dealers are easy to spot, residents told us. They wear designer chest bags and drive flashy cars, so the addicts know who’s ‘pushing.’ Unlike Jose, they don’t seem to worry much about the police.

We stopped a man in his mid-30s with a scraggly blond goatee, leaning against a brand-new SUV and told him we were asking people who they’re voting for.

Flashing a crooked, yellowed grin, he snickered, ‘Try the graveyard.’

Twenty minutes north, at the end of a side road, the yellow awning of Cheeks Gentlemans Club glows on a Sunday night.

Inside, the music is blaring. Its energy is not matched by the spending of the patrons.

A long wooden stage runs through the room, ringed by faded floral swivel chairs that look like they were bought in 1994. Football flickers on every screen.

At one point the evening news comes on, and a poll flashes up showing Brown four points ahead of Husted. Nobody looks up.

‘You know s*** isn’t right when the stripping business is taking a hit,’ said Storm, 28, a well-spoken brunette with a shoulder tattoo.

She started dancing at 18 and grew up 15 minutes from Middletown. Two years ago a good weekend was worth nearly $2,500. Now she’s lucky to clear $1,000 and the stage tips have all but dried up.

‘Guys used to throw cash on the open stage,’ she said. ‘Now they waddle up holding one dollar and expect a f***ing lap dance.’

Her customers are construction and factory workers who come in big groups. Most of them, she figures, voted for Trump.

‘A few of my regulars were really excited during the election. Now hardly any of them mention it,’ she said. ‘Not one has brought up the one happening in a few days.

‘People have bigger issues, like paying bills. It’s funny, because the only way to fix that is to vote. But that’s not how it plays out around here.’

Later, Storm took the stage. A pudgy man with an unkempt beard, a ball cap, work jeans and worn boots began raining $1 bills over her. Within five minutes two other dancers had swooped and stolen him away. When his singles ran out, they scattered.

‘We’re basically sexy therapists,’ Storm said. Men pour out tales of their divorces and their debts to her.

Will any of them vote?

‘No. They’re dealing with their s*** and just trying to get by. When they want a little fun, they come here,’ she said.

‘People just want to escape. But most of us can’t. We’re stuck here.’

Storm didn’t vote for Trump-Vance in 2024. Asked about him, she’d almost forgotten he was from around here.

‘Oh yeah, he grew up here, right?’ she said. ‘Didn’t he make a movie or a book about it?’