JD Vance addresses voter integrity at Pittsburgh rally following 2020 election denial
By Adam Babetski / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Republican vice presidential nominee and Ohio Sen. JD Vance spoke about election integrity and disparaged Kamala Harris’ recent interview with Fox News during a rally in Downtown Pittsburgh Thursday afternoon.
A contingent of local Republican officials led by U.S. House chief deputy whip Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, R-Peters, and Slippery Rock Mayor JD Longo kicked off the rally, which took place in the Grand Hall at the Pennsylvanian, a Gilded Age train station and former luxury hotel.
Mr. Vance took the stage to applause from the roughly 200 supporters. He gestured to his surroundings, dubbing Pittsburgh “one of the great capitals of American craftsmanship.”
Mr. Vance quickly moved on to Ms. Harris’ contentious interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier that aired Wednesday night.
“Wow, wow,” he said, shaking his head. “That made me feel pretty bad. I felt bad for her, and I felt bad for every single person who was watching.”
“The entire theme of her campaign is basically her pretending that she doesn’t even know who Joe Biden is,” he said. He claimed Ms. Harris doesn’t want to be held responsible for her actions in office and deflected Mr. Baier’s questions to attack Donald Trump instead.
“She is pathologically incapable of talking about the American future without talking about a person who hasn’t been president for three and a half years,” he said.
Mr. Vance said Ms. Harris — not Republicans — is responsible for the political divide in the country, and that she should “do her damn job” instead of censoring her critics on social media.
The Republicans — and Mr. Vance in particular — have made opposition to “censorship” of social media a central plank in their platform, complaining that pandemic-era efforts to tamp down the spread of misinformation, especially when assisted by input from government agencies, is a threat to democracy.
In his debate with Minnesota Gov. and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz on Oct. 1, Mr. Vance said that Democrats “wanted to kick people off of Facebook for saying that toddlers shouldn’t wear [COVID-19] masks.” Mr. Walz told Mr. Vance that he did not run Facebook.
In Pittsburgh Thursday, Mr. Vance said: “This is America, and we get to say whatever the hell we want to,” prompting a loud “USA” chant from the audience.
Mr. Vance’s Pittsburgh rally was the latest stop in his tour across the Keystone State ahead of Election Week. During a rally in Williamsport on Wednesday, Mr. Vance denied that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.
Mr. Vance regularly has dodged the question of whether or not Trump won in 2020, but in Williamsport he said, “I think there are serious problems in 2020. So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use.”
At another campaign event in Philadelphia, Mr. Vance cryptically said that he would accept the election results in Pennsylvania as long as the ballots were legally cast. Republican State Secretary Al Schmidt has said repeatedly that widespread voter fraud does not take place in the state, especially not in presidential elections.
When asked if Ms. Harris should accept the results of the election if she is behind, given the questions he has raised about voting integrity, Mr. Vance instead told the Post-Gazette that he was confident that the election would go smoothly.
“You can say on the one hand that you don’t think Big Tech should be interfering in an election, while at the same time respecting the results of the election. I don’t think there’s any inconsistency in that,” he said. “Most people in our country, whether they agree or disagree with me on any given issue, can admit that we can have faith in the 2024 election. I do have faith in the 2024 election, while accepting that we can do a hell of a lot better at the same time.”
Mr. Vance said that he respected that mail-in ballots are a legitimate way to vote, but that the Republican Party is “fighting every single day” to fix perceived issues with the system.
Earlier this month, five of Mr. Vance’s colleagues in Congress filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania seeking to interfere with the state’s overseas ballots, many from active military service members, a case that former Pennsylvania federal Judge John Jones III called a likely attempt at voter suppression.
Mr. Vance spoke about local issues in Pennsylvania, like rising housing and grocery prices. He referred to Pennsylvania as “The Saudi Arabia of natural gas” while invoking a common Trump refrain: “Drill, baby, drill!”
Mr. Vance claimed that Ms. Harris wants to ban fracking — which she has repeatedly denied — and said that she would rather buy oil and gas from “tinpot dictators” instead.
Mr. Vance said that “criminal gangs” and “people who have no legal right to be there in the first place” are plaguing Aurora, Colo., and Charleroi, a small town near Pittsburgh that Trump has falsely claimed was being bankrupted by Haitian immigrants.
Charleroi’s Republican State Sen. Camera Bartolotta, responded to the claims on X, writing that the immigrants were there legally and helping to staff struggling local businesses.
Mr. Vance doubled down: “When we add thousands upon thousands of children of illegal aliens to Pennsylvania schools, children who can’t even speak the local language, that means that American citizens lose quality in their education,” he said.
In the birthright citizenship principle in the U.S. Constitution, children who are born to illegal immigrants living in the United States have full citizenship. Trump has said several times that he would end birthright citizenship using an executive order on his first day in office. In an interview in Nevada in August, Mr. Vance said that he agreed with Trump’s policy to eliminate birthright citizenship.