Tom Nichols of The Atlantic: “The American working poor, no matter where they are, do in fact need civic representatives from the center-right, people who can talk candidly about the limits of government and who can make a moral case for tough love and personal responsibility, but one based on a sense of shared experience, common values, and genuine compassion. Someone like Vance could be that candidate. Someone like Vance, perhaps, but as we now know, not Vance himself. Not so long ago, he talked about the self-defeating bias against education among poor whites. He acknowledged the self-destructive habits of some of the people he grew up around. Vance wrote, in this very magazine, that Donald Trump ‘is cultural heroin’ – a powerful charge from someone who hails from the epicenter of the opioid epidemic – and provided a ‘quick high’ that could not fix what ails the country. All of that vanished once Vance decided he wanted to go to Washington – and after the Trump supporter Peter Thiel dropped $10 million into a PAC.”

“Instead of a truth-teller in his own community, Vance as a candidate has become a contemptible and cringe-inducing clown. His attempts at authenticity are so grating because they are so blatantly artificial. His recent tweets, for example, attempting to ingratiate himself with rural Ohioans by slagging New York City were embarrassingly amateurish; we can only wonder which social-media consultant thought them up. ‘Serious question,’ Vance tweeted. ‘I have to go to New York soon and I’m trying to figure out where to stay. I have heard it’s disgusting and violent there. But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?'”