The Ohio primary was May 3, and unofficial results show that JD Vance, a Middletown-born venture capitalist and author, won the Ohio GOP's favor with 32.2% of votes cast. 

Vance, a Trump-endorsed candidate known for his 2016 memoir "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis," said his next campaign steps are to "get the message out as much as possible."

"Like we saw with the campaign for the primary, it'll be true for the general election, too, that a lot of voters will pay attention the closer and closer we get to election day," Vance told Mount Vernon News. "But some people start paying attention immediately, and so you start trying to reach people as much as you can, do as many events as you can and eventually start running commercials to get our message out there. I think we'll do all those things over the next few months."

Vance said he also foresees the battle for border security and drug trafficking control continuing after the general election. He won the midterms in a crowded GOP field against Matt Dolan (23.33%), Josh Mandel (23.89%), Mike Gibbons (11.65%), Jane Timken (5.88%), Mark Pukita (2.12%) and Neil Patel (0.93%). He will face Democrat Tim Ryan, who currently serves as a U.S. Representative for Ohio's District 13.

The candidate spoke of strengthening energy and manufacturing enterprises, citing Ariel as one of the area companies that benefits from a "strong American energy sector."

President Joe Biden, Vance said, has "intentionally weakened American energy in the name of environmental policy." 

"But in reality, the people who end up benefiting [from the policy] are some of the dirtiest economies in the world," Vance said. "So we lose American jobs, and Mount Vernon has been affected by that."

Should he be elected, the Republican primary winner pledges to build an economy where the average American can earn livable, family-supporting wages, and not lose more income to inflation. 

"We'll be working on those things in the Senate," Vance said. 

According to data from U.S. Census Bureau, 12.6% of Ohioans lived in poverty in July 2021, slightly higher than the nationwide poverty rate of 11.4%. Vance noted inflation as a problem and as a "tax on the poor."

"If you're a person that has a fair amount of money, you don't have to worry much about paying $1 extra for gasoline or another 50 cents for ground beef at the grocery," he said. "But if you're very poor, you do, and I think that is one of the main things that we have to get under control in this country. If inflation goes up by 8%, and a person's wages only go up by 2%, then the poverty that they're experiencing is so much greater. So, I think in some ways we just have to stop the incredible harm of inflation."

Bolstering growth in manufacturing and industrial job markets is another antidote to the impoverished living conditions that plague much of the country, he said. Manufacturing jobs not being high-paying or stable, according to Vance, "is one of the big drivers of poverty."

"It's not, not having a job, it's having an unstable job or having a low-wage job," he said. "I really think that we have to bring back American manufacturing so that people who are hard-working and who want to provide for their families are actually able to do so."