Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear is preparing to use a Democratic Party event in Middletown, Ohio, to launch a pointed attack on Vice President JD Vance by turning the Republicans bestselling memoir into a political cudgel.
According to Breitbart, Beshear is slated to headline a Butler County Democratic Party gathering on Saturday evening in Vances hometown, where his prepared remarks focus heavily on Hillbilly Elegy and on portraying Vance as out of touch with the very working-class voters he claims to champion. The Democratic governor, who has built his brand on a more moderate image than many in his party, is expected to lean into class and regional grievances while attempting to undermine Vances credibility with Appalachian and blue-collar communities that have increasingly shifted toward Republicans in recent election cycles.
Beshears prepared excerpts, first circulated by Politico, show him accusing Vance of denigrating Kentuckians and Appalachian workers in his memoir, declaring, [Vance] wrote an entire book that trafficked in tired stereotypes about the proud people of my state. Calling the people who mined the coal that powered the Industrial Revolution and two world wars lazy. Saying that addiction is the fault of people struggling and not the opioid manufacturers who flooded our communities with pills. As AG I sued more of them than any attorney general in the country, and if I could have found more of them to sue I would have. The governors framing attempts to recast the book not as a sympathetic portrait of hardship, but as an elitist critique that blames individuals rather than powerful institutions, even as Vance has long argued that personal responsibility and cultural renewal are indispensable to any serious recovery.
Beshear is also expected to sharpen his rhetoric by dismissing the memoir outright, saying, JD on the other hand his book Hillbilly Elegy was just hillbilly hate. It was poverty tourism. Because he aint from Appalachia. And Ohio deserved a much better senator than him and we all deserve a much better vice president. But lets talk about how we turn this around. How we actually go win back those voters JD Vance is so condescending to.
That line of attack reflects a broader Democratic strategy of painting Vance as a political opportunist who cashed in on the struggles of working-class whites, even as his critics on the left have spent years deriding those same communities as backward, bigoted, or beyond persuasion.
Seeking to bolster his own standing with Appalachian voters, Beshear plans to contrast his electoral record with Vances portrayal of the region, stating, We have to talk to people and not at them. Thats how I won counties in Eastern Kentucky that normally vote for Republicans by large margins.
Including Breathitt County, the county JD Vance pretends to be from. Donald Trump won this county by 59 points. I won it by 22 points the year before. So I know we can win in tough areas when we lead with whats important to us. The governors boast underscores Democrats anxiety over their collapse among rural and working-class voters, even as he glosses over the fact that those same voters have increasingly embraced the populist, pro-Trump conservatism that Vance now represents.
The renewed focus on Hillbilly Elegy highlights the enduring political resonance of Vances 2016 memoir, which chronicles his upbringing in Middletown and his familys Appalachian roots and has sold roughly 1.6 million copies. Initially praised by many in the media as a window into the white working class after Donald Trumps 2016 victory, the book later drew fire from progressive commentators who claimed it echoed common GOP talking points prioritizing personal responsibility over community care and derided it as poverty porn wrapped in a right-wing message, a criticism that reveals more about the lefts discomfort with moral agency than about Vances narrative.
The Netflix adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy has also reemerged in the public eye since Vance joined Trump on the 2024 Republican ticket, with the film reportedly having skyrocketed in popularity after his selection. It began trending upward on Netflixs Top 10 list and climbed as high as No. 4 in the United States, suggesting that despite elite backlash, there remains a broad audience for stories that grapple with family breakdown, addiction, and cultural decay outside the usual progressive frameworks.
Breitbart News Senior Editor John Nolte, in a 2020 review, pushed back on the notion that Vances book sneers at its subjects, writing, I read Hillbilly Elegy earlier this year and was impressed, not only with how compelling the story was but that there was no sneering in Vances look back, despite the fact he ended up at Yale. That assessment stands in stark contrast to Beshears charge of hillbilly hate, underscoring the partisan divide over whether confronting cultural dysfunction is an act of contempt or an honest attempt at diagnosis and reform.
Vance himself has long framed the memoir as an effort to give voice to communities ignored by coastal elites, stating in a previously released video, I wrote Hillbilly Elegy because I wanted to give people a sense of what it was like to live in a community like mine. I didnt think a whole lot of stories were told about white working-class Americans, while noting that he sought to highlight challenges such as job loss, addiction, and economic decline.
That emphasis on lived experience and structural economic shifts, paired with a call for personal responsibility, has made Vance a lightning rod for a left that often prefers narratives of victimhood unmoored from questions of culture, family, and individual choice.
Beshears planned broadside comes as national Democrats increasingly treat Vance as a likely contender for the 2028 presidential race and a leading voice in the post-Trump conservative movement. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, speaking earlier this week, took his own swipe at the vice president, saying, Hes not the first vice president to have to effectively ignore his own values in order to serve with Donald Trump. And you know, you can tell that there is something off in the MAGA coalition, because JD Vance is uncharacteristically quiet.
Vances press secretary, Taylor Van Kirk, dismissed Beshears attacks as self-serving theatrics, responding, Every time Andy Beshear attacks the Vice President to try to get himself publicity, he ends up humiliating himself in the process, but maybe thats something hes into? Her response framed the Kentucky governors rhetoric as more about raising his own national profile within a left-leaning media ecosystem than about any genuine concern for Appalachian voters.
Addressing Buttigiegs comments, Van Kirk was equally blunt, saying, Pete Buttigieg is an unemployed man who recently moved to Michigan and then chickened out of a Senate run because hes clearly unelectable. The media should stop treating his ramblings as news.
That rejoinder reflects a broader conservative frustration with a press corps that continues to elevate progressive figures who have struggled with voters while treating populist conservatives as objects of scorn rather than serious representatives of a large swath of the country.
Beshears latest offensive also revives his earlier clashes with Vance, including a 2024 appearance on MSNBCs Morning Joe in which he claimed, JD Vance calls pregnancy resulting from rape inconvenient. Inconvenience is traffic. Make him go through this, a remark that drew significant backlash and that he later walked back by insisting he would never wish harm on anyone.
The episode highlighted the increasingly harsh rhetoric Democrats deploy on abortion, even as they accuse Republicans of extremism for defending unborn life and opposing the most radical elements of the lefts agenda.
The Kentucky governor previously attracted ridicule for mocking Vances soft drink of choice, sneering, Who drinks Diet Mountain Dew? before later staging a public mea culpa in which he brought a bottle of the soda to a press conference and stated, Folks, Ive been a person that when sometimes Ive gone over the line, Ive wanted to make sure that I set the record straight, so, I do owe an apology to Diet Mountain Dew.
As Beshear returns to attacking Vance in his own hometown, voters in Middletown and across Appalachia will ultimately decide whether they see a Democrat governor defending their dignity or another national Democrat talking at them while a populist conservative vice president continues to speak to their frustrations with cultural decay, economic decline, and a political class that has too often written them off.
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