In KY county where JD Vance has roots, some call him ‘a sellout,’ but others are excited

It was big news in the political world this week when former President Donald Trump picked Ohio Sen. JD Vance to run with him as his vice presidential pick.

The day after the announcement, though, the news hadn’t caught up with some people in Breathitt County, where Vance spent summers as a child.

“I don’t know who this JD guy is,” said Nicka Ford, who with her husband Ben owns the Kountry Kitchen restaurant in Jackson, the county seat. “I had no idea this was going on.”

Ford said her husband keeps up with the news, but she was focused on running the restaurant.

One of her customers, however, said he was well aware of Trump’s choice.

“I’m excited,” said 64-year-old Tommy Miller, who pastors the Caney Creek Mennonite Church and operates a catering company. “He knows what it’s like to live here in Eastern Kentucky.”

Vance, 39, a Yale Law School graduate who has also worked as a venture capitalist, wrote a memoir called “Hillbilly Elegy” that described his chaotic early years when his mother struggled with substance abuse and domestic abuse.

The book was a best-seller and received glowing reviews in some quarters for its depiction of the struggles of the white working class in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. Others though, saw it as disparaging to Appalachia.

In a Kentucky Democratic Party fundraising email this week, state Sen. Cassie Chambers Armstrong, a Democrat who grew up in Appalachian Kentucky but now lives in Louisville, said Vance had made a name for himself “by painting a picture of our region as a place of despair and dysfunction, a place to escape from.”

Armstrong has written a memoir about her upbringing in the region as well.

Vance’s mother’s parents, who had a significant role in raising him, were natives of Breathitt County but left after World War II for Middletown, Ohio, which is between Cincinnati and Dayton.

His grandfather found work at the Armco steel mill there.

Tens of thousands of other people from Appalachian Kentucky made the same journey to industrial cities in the Midwest between WWII and the late 1960s.

Vance was born and grew up in Middletown, but he wrote that as a child, he made frequent visits to his great-grandmother’s home near Jackson, including spending summers there, and still considers Jackson “home.”

“At a deep level, Jackson was the one place that belonged to me, my sister, and Mamaw,” Vance wrote. “I loved Ohio, but it was full of painful memories.”

Vance still has relatives in Breathitt County and neighboring Owsley County, said Stephen D. Bowling, director of the Breathitt County Public Library and a city council member in Jackson.

Vance also owns property in Breathitt County. He paid $70,600 for 98 acres in the Frozen community in 2017, according to local records.

Bowling said the property, located about three miles from Jackson, had been owned by Vance’s ancestors.

During his acceptance speech Wednesday night at the Republican National Convention, Vance said he hopes to be buried at a family cemetery in Breathitt County where generations of his family lie.

“I think his heart’s still here,” Bowling said.

Some county residents said that having a person with ties to the county in such a prominent position nationally is a point of pride.

“I think on net it’s a positive for the county,” said Mike Bryant, the local Republican Party chairman. “It’ll give us some limelight.”

And if Trump wins, Vance could do good things for the place he still calls home, some said.

“The upside of a Vance vice-presidency could be that he understands the need for jobs and infrastructure in Breathitt County, and Vance would be in a position to have a positive impact on the economy of his ancestral home,” said Jackson Mayor Laura Thomas.

Bowling said the hope is that Vance could use his influence to bring positive change to the to the lives of people whose struggles he has written about.

The region has real problems, he said, but “I wouldn’t leave it for anyplace else.”

The hilly, rural county, like much of Eastern Kentucky, could use a shot in the arm.

The coal industry was once a key employer, but jobs slumped badly beginning in 2012.

There has been a modest increase in recent years, but there are still far fewer coal jobs in the region than in 2011, and the Appalachian Regional Commission calculated the poverty rate in the county at 31.3% in the current fiscal year.

The population of Jackson is about 2,000 and the county population was 13,718 in the 2020 Census, but the Kentucky State Data Center has projected that the county will lose more than 16% of its population over the next 25 years.

And the Community and Economic Development Initiative of Kentucky, a program at the University of Kentucky, projected that the number of jobs in Breathitt County would drop from 2,737 in 2022 to to 2,548 in 2027.

Miller, the minister who owns the catering company, said he ran a car-repair garage for 16 years before the downturn in the coal industry hurt business.

Many of the jobs he gets for the catering business are outside the county, he said.

“We just have to travel where the money is, and it’s not here,” he said.

Miller said he is a registered Democrat but will vote for Trump and Vance because he believes the county and the country will benefit.

During his convention speech, Vance said Breathitt County is one of the 10 poorest in the nation, but lauded the character of the people.

“They’re very hardworking people, and they’re very good people,” Vance said. “They’re the kind of people who would give you the shirt off their back even if they can’t afford enough food to eat.”

Not everyone is impressed that Trump picked someone with family roots in the county to run for vice-president.

Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 8,116 to 1,762 in the county, and some of those Democrats are die-hards.

Calvin Saum II, a truck driver who ran unsuccessfully for county judge-executive in the 2022 Democratic primary, pointed out that Vance was a harsh critic of Trump during the 2016 campaign.

Vance reportedly called Trump reprehensible and an idiot at the time, and compared him to Hitler, but has since become a vocal supporter of Trump.

Some have questioned if the change is real or mere political opportunism, but Vance has said he ultimately realized his positions were in line with Trump and truly supports him.

Saum doesn’t buy it. He thinks Vance hitched his wagon to Trump for political gain and doubts he’ll do much to help Eastern Kentucky.

“I think he’s a sellout,” said Saum. “I think JD Vance is for JD Vance.”

Saum said Vance was right in his earlier criticism of Trump, but acknowledges a lot of people in the county don’t share his deep disdain for for the former president.

“I get a lot of crap over that,” he said.

Many of those 8,116 registered Democrats in the county are political and religious conservatives.

So even though at the local level — where politics is more personal in a rural place — every elected county official is a Democrat, many Breathitt County Democrats are out of step with the national party on issues including abortion and gun rights.

Trump, promising to bring back coal jobs and appoint judges who would do away with a national right to abortion, won the county over Hillary Clinton by a margin of more than 2 to 1 in 2016.

He widened his win locally in 2020, beating Joe Biden 4,265 votes to 1,301, according to state records.

There have been more coal jobs in Eastern Kentucky and the nation during much of Biden’s term than there were at the end of Trump’s term, a year when the COVID-19 pandemic sapped the economy.

But Biden won’t get traction locally from the modest increase in jobs, said Jamie Holbrook, the county Democratic Party chairman.

The industry was destined for decline in the region, in part because many premium seams had been mined out, Holbrook said, but some people are still convinced Trump will revive coal.

“Did you see coal come back the last time Trump was in?” Holbrook said.

Trump and Vance will carry the county again this year, said Bryant, the county GOP chair.

“On the federal level, we’re solid red,” he said.