Q&A: Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance talks 2020 election, opioids and state of GOP

After more than a year of campaigning, the race for Ohio's next U.S. senator is almost over.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan and Republican J.D. Vance are facing off in the Nov. 8 election for the seat being vacated by retiring GOP Sen. Rob Portman. Independent polls have shown a competitive race between the two candidates, and national groups are pouring money into the Buckeye State to boost their preferred candidate.

USA TODAY Network Ohio sat down with Vance at a Cincinnati coffee shop last week to discuss his campaign and key issues in the race. A Q&A with Ryan was published yesterday.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

What should voters know about you that they don't already?

Vance: I think there's a lot that a lot of voters don't know about me. They don't know where I'm from. They don't know why I care about the things that I do. Part of our job is to try to tell people a little bit more about my story, a little bit more about why I'm doing this and why I think I can be a good public servant.

That's the main thing. And then obviously, there's sort of a few issues ? where, at any given time, there are 15 things that I care about ? but the three issues that I think are really going to drive voters, and I think the three most significant crises we have in our country right now are the rising prices, the border and crime.

What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of the Republican Party?

Vance: We have an entirely new group of voters. They're more working class.

If you compared 2020's electorate for the GOP to say, 2012 electorate for GOP, it's more racially diverse, more Blacks ? especially Black men ? a large number of additional Latinos who are in the GOP coalition, a large number of additional white voters, especially white, working-class voters. That coalition is just different.

I think a lot of GOP leadership, they don't maybe like their new membership. They prefer the country club GOP membership that they had 20 or 30 years ago. I happen to really like our voters, and I think we have to do a better job of serving them. So I think that's the biggest weakness in our party.

I think our strength is maybe the mirror image, that we have a really, really interesting new coalition. We have a lot of energy. I think there's a lot of new ideas. A candidate like me could not have won a Republican primary 10 years ago. One of my main things that I ran on was raising taxes on companies that ship jobs overseas. I remember even now, there were a lot of Republican consultants who were like, "This is crazy. You can't run on that message." Even though it was popular with our voters. The biggest problem, but also the biggest promise of the GOP is that the coalition has really shifted, and that provides a lot of opportunities, but it also provides a lot of risks, especially for our leadership.

People are still concerned about the economy and inflation. What needs to happen to lower costs and help people afford their day-to-day needs?

Vance: I think the most important thing, both from the perspective of businesses who are trying to hire, run their business, make things, but also from the perspective of individual consumers and people trying to live their lives, is energy prices are way, way too high. That's a utility bill problem. It's a gas pump problem, which, unfortunately, gas is going in the wrong direction right now. It's a fertilizer for farmers problem. It's a natural gas and steel manufacturing problem.

I think this is largely a self-inflicted wound. Global commodity prices are always going to shift here and there in ways that you can't control. But if you look at things like the Keystone pipeline, shutting down that on day one, if you look at the really low number of oil and gas permits the Biden administration has granted, I think that we've really shot ourselves in the foot when it comes to energy prices.

The justification for this is people worry about climate change, and they want to get carbon emissions lower. But if you're shifting manufacturing to China, and you're producing more energy in places like China and India, you're going to make the planet much dirtier than if you did that energy production here in the United States.

So I think both from an environmental perspective, but also an economic perspective, current energy policies don't make any sense.

To what extent should the federal government be involved in abortion policy?

Vance: I'd like it to be primarily a state issue. Ohio is going to want to have a different abortion policy from California, from New York, and I think that's reasonable.

I want Ohio to be able to make its own decisions, and I want Ohio's elected legislators to make those decisions. But I think it's fine to sort of set some minimum national standard.

What should the government be doing to make health care and prescription drugs more affordable?

Vance: I'm a big fan of letting Medicare and private buyers renegotiate prescription drug prices, reimport prescription drug prices.

It's one of these really weird things where people who say they believe in the free market would allow a drug to be sold to Europe at a certain price and then wouldn't allow a European to sell that drug back into the United States at whatever price they said.

That would actually lower costs significantly because the Europeans are basically parasitic off of the American biotech industry. They pay lower prices, even though they get the same stuff that we do. I think we should bring some parity here. That would lower prices for people.

Now, there are a lot of regulatory things that we can do on prescription drugs. One of the reasons why insulin is so expensive is because the FDA has been a total disaster. It's basically given legal monopolies to companies that produce insulin, so of course, they can jack up the price as much as they want to.

I've always been one of these people who says, we're not going to let people die on the streets. We're the richest country in the world, and we can't let people die from preventable illnesses because of lack of health care. Broadly speaking, we could do a lot better job on that in this country.

Do you believe President Joe Biden was legitimately elected in 2020?

Vance: I mean, he's the president, right? He is certainly the legitimate president of the United States.

The thing that I've always said here, and I'll repeat to you, is was the election in 2020 free and fair, was it above board? My answer is no, I really don't think that it was.

There are many arguments we can make, but here's the thing that I think made the election fundamentally a problem in 2020. It's not foreign people hacking into the voting machines and changing Biden votes into Trump votes or Trump votes into Biden votes. It's the influence of the technology industry on the election.

A few weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed what a lot of us had suspected, which is that the leadership of the FBI told him to censor a story that was incredibly damaging to Joe Biden. It was about Hunter Biden's business dealings ? the famous Hunter Biden laptop story. Mark Zuckerberg said that he censored that story at the behest of his own government.

Is it okay that a technology company, at the behest of our government, censors information that influences millions of votes? I just think the answer is clearly no.

Fact check:Breaking down what J.D Vance, Tim Ryan said during Ohio Senate debate

We conducted a poll that found many voters are concerned about threats to democracy. What threats, if any, do you think currently exist?

Vance: The one I just pointed out I think is a major threat to democracy. Something relatively bipartisan over 200 years in this country ? you go back to Teddy Roosevelt or go back to Franklin Roosevelt ? there was a recognition that large corporations should not be able to influence American politics.

I worry about this with the influence of money. I think our campaign finance system is totally jacked up. But a much, much more significant concern is you can't let these companies control the flow of information in a way that benefits one party or another. Ninety percent of people get their news from social media alerts, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram ? the whole suite of social media, that is now the modern public square.

We can't let the modern public square be controlled by companies ? some of whom, by the way, have a financial interest in China ? and expect to have a functioning democracy. What would it have looked like in 1938 if Nazi Germany had went and bought up the five biggest newspapers in the United States of America? Everybody ? Democrat, Republican ? would be like, "That's not OK. That's a threat to our democracy." Certainly, I think it's a threat today.

The nonprofit you founded, in part to combat opioid addiction, has faced a lot of criticism. Do you feel you've been effective in addressing this problem so far, and what more would you want to accomplish as senator?

Vance: I wish it had been a more ambitious project.

I think that we did do some good, and I think the Ryan campaign attacks on it are kind of ridiculous. I still don't understand this argument that somehow I took money from the nonprofit even though I put $80,000 of my own resources into the nonprofit, and it did help people.

We did do some good psychiatric treatment, some good mental health support for people, so I'm proud of that, but certainly I wish that it could have done more and I wish that it had done more.

Broadly speaking, there's a supply and demand problem that's very simple. You have to cut down the supply of fentanyl coming into the state of Ohio. I think that's primarily a border problem. It's also a China problem because a lot of fentanyl is being manufactured in China and then brought in through the southern border.

Then there's a demand problem. You see this pretty consistently that when people lose their jobs, when people lose their livelihoods, the demand for opioids goes through the roof. We have to make sure people have better lives, they have access to treatment facilities when they want to take the first step to recovery. I think if you do all those things, you can hopefully tamp down on the demand for opioids, but also block the supply. You do that, you start to solve the problem.

You grew up in a low-income family, and you're part of a Republican Party that doesn't want to spend excessively on government services like Social Security. Given what you know about how these programs can help low-income families, where do you land on this?

Vance: A lot of the people who were union blue collar Democrats and my grandparents' and my parents' generation are now Republicans, and I think we have to do a much better job. If I'm just talking about our party, we have to do a better job at serving those people.

When you see people aggressively leaning into, we need to cut Medicare, we need to cut Social Security, I think there are ways we can save costs by bringing down the price of prescription drugs, for example, but I don't think that we should be throwing people out on the streets and saying, well, you're on your own now.

Do I think sometimes the welfare system is bad? Absolutely. Let me give you a couple examples. One is that it discourages people from getting married. If you get married, and you combine those two incomes, you can lose welfare benefits. We should be promoting marriage. If two people want to get married, that's a good thing, and Republicans should be supportive of it. Our welfare system shouldn't discourage it.

There are also these really significant benefits cliffs in our Medicaid system, for example. I know a woman who a couple years ago got a raise at work, and actually asked her employer not to give her a raise because if she got it, she would fall off the Medicaid benefit cliff.

There are a lot of things that we could do to smooth out those benefit cliffs. We want people to make more money. We want them to become self-sufficient. We don't want to kick them off of their health care if they make $2 more an hour. I think a lot of smarter public policy can fix this issue.

Haley BeMiller is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves the Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio.

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This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Ohio Senate race: J.D. Vance discusses economy, 2020 election, opioids