Vice President JD Vance rallied Montana voters to support Republican congressional candidates by framing the midterm elections as a choice between a post-racial sovereignty, supported by the GOP, and a system dominated by Democrats who don’t want the United States to thrive.
“In the last couple of years, we have cut down on visa fraud and fought against anybody who would lay off an American worker and replace them with a low-wage foreigner because sovereignty means that American jobs go to the American people,” Vance said Monday afternoon while speaking at an airplane hangar in Belgrade, Montana.
“Sovereignty means that you control your streets and that every American child, whether they are black or white, whether they are rich or poor, should be able to walk to a park or walk to a school without their parents worried about their safety,” Vance said. “And that is why Donald J. Trump closed the border on Day 1 and went to war against the drug cartels.”
Over the past two weeks, Vance, President Donald Trump, and House Speaker Mike Johnson have traveled to Montana to boost turnout for Aaron Flint, the Republican candidate for Montana’s 1st Congressional District, against Democrat Sam Forstag. The two men are vying to replace outgoing Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT).
Vance also campaigned for Republican Senate nominee Kurt Alme, who is running against independent Seth Bodnar, Democrat Alani Bankhead, and libertarian Kyle Austin. The contest is for an open seat after incumbent Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) opted to retire this year.
Vance has framed the midterm elections as a battle for what kind of country the U.S. will be, invoking his childhood to sell the message.
“I remember as a kid driving around with my grandfather, a union welder at a steel mill who could identify the cars that were made with American steel, and he’d beam with pride when he did so,” Vance said about his childhood. “I remember playing pee wee football in leagues where the sons of working-class white kids played together on teams with the sons of working-class black kids, never worrying about the color of our skin or the relative privilege of black or white; we knew that we were privileged to grow up in the United States of America.”
Vance’s comments echoed, in some ways, former President Barack Obama’s 2004 racial unity speech at the Democratic National Convention, which put him on the national radar and sparked presidential rumors.
“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the United States of America,” Obama, then an Illinois state senator, said. “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America, there’s the United States of America.”
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Vance is widely considered a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028 and has some similarities to Obama. The two men come from interracial families. Obama is the son of a white mother and a father from Kenya, while Vance, a white man, is married to Usha Vance, who’s of Indian descent, and has biracial children. Both are based in the Midwest.
Vance also served as a U.S. senator representing Ohio before becoming vice president, while Obama served as a U.S. senator from Illinois. Obama also similarly played coy about not running for president before ultimately launching his historic 2008 campaign.