‘Hillbilly Energy’ — JD Vance Recounts Middletown Upbringing in Viral Video Released on Eve of VP Debate

A viral video released Monday features Republican vice-presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) recounting his upbringing in Middletown, Ohio, and emphasizing he hails from the places he wants to represent.

Republican strategist Andrew Surabian released the video on X, as Vance and Democrat vice-presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) are set to square off in the lone vice-presidential debate Tuesday.

“This is” JD Vance, Surabian wrote in his post, adding the hashtag “#HillbillyEnergy” — a play on Vance’s bestseller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

In the two-minute video featuring a previous interview from Vance, the 40-year-old populist notes that many feel as though the American Dream is becoming progressively out of reach before reflecting on his own upbringing in Middletown, Ohio, during the 1990s:

The world I grew up in was one where I think for the first time really in American history, you know, my parents generation did not expect their children to necessarily have a better life than they did. And you saw that in all kinds of different ways, but there was this sense of growing up in Middletown in the 1990s that a lot of people didn’t expect the future to be better than the past, and that’s a really unique and a really tragic thing.

While jobs left Middletown, once a dominant manufacturing city in the nation, drugs and “hopelessness” became prominent, Vance said.

WATCH — Vance: Media, Harris Campaign Have Been “Calling the Residents of Springfield Racists”:

“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 didn’t think a whole lot of stories were told about white working-class Americans,” he said.

“I didn’t think a lot of stores were told about people who were struggling with some of the problems we were struggling with: joblessness, drug addiction, so forth,” he continued. “And I thought that I could tell a story that would make people understand my family a little bit better and maybe, in the process, understand the struggles of a lot of families.”

Vance adds that the nation must begin electing officials who actually hail from the communities they want to represent in Washington, DC.

“I come from the places that I want to represent, and what we need is to stop sending people who are of the D.C. swamp. We need to send people who are of the places they aim to represent,” he concluded.