A closer look at the Middletown, Ohio, featured in JD Vance’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy’

With Senator JD Vance named Donald Trump’s running mate, commentators are dusting off Vance’s 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, to explain America’s political moment. Eight years ago, Vance was a Never-Trumper, comparing Trumpism to “cultural heroin” in an op-ed for The Atlantic. Yet Vance’s book about growing up in a struggling city in southwestern Ohio became a go-to primer for explaining the Trumpian turn in American politics. One reviewer even likened Vance to an Appalachian Ta-Nehisi...