A half brother of Vice President JD Vance who is running for mayor of Cincinnati advanced on Tuesday to compete in the general election.
The candidate, Cory Bowman, a Republican coffee shop owner, won a small share of the votes in Tuesday’s nonpartisan primary, according to The Associated Press. He came in second to the current mayor, Aftab Pureval, a Democrat.
They will now face each other again in November. The results pushed a third candidate, Brian Frank, also a Republican, out of the race.
Cincinnati mayoral elections are technically nonpartisan, but it has been decades since the city elected a Republican to the office. Vice President Kamala Harris won 77 percent of the city’s voters last fall, even as President Trump and Mr. Vance, Ohio’s junior senator, took the state.
David Niven, a professor of politics at the University of Cincinnati, said Mr. Bowman’s family connections were unlikely to change that dynamic. “You can’t get that far as a Trump-Vance Republican in the city of Cincinnati.” But anywhere else in the state of Ohio, Dr. Niven said, “He’d be in better shape as a candidate.”
Mr. Pureval won both the primary and the general mayoral elections four years ago by wide margins. Until a few months ago, he had seemed poised to run unopposed for a second term. Both Republicans said that possibility spurred them to enter the race, which has focused on local matters like affordable housing, potholes and public safety.
Mr. Bowman and Mr. Frank have accused Mr. Pureval’s administration of neglecting infrastructural repairs, rushing a new zoning plan and failing to clear the streets quickly after a major snowstorm pummeled the city in January.
Mr. Pureval said that his administration had pushed aggressively, and successfully, to increase the city’s stock of affordable housing, invest in public safety and revitalize the city’s downtown after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Mr. Bowman grew up in Ohio and spent several years in Florida before moving to Cincinnati in 2020. He and his wife, Jordan, run a coffee shop and a nondenominational evangelical church, both in the city’s West End.
He did not vote for mayor in 2021, which he said was common in the city where turnout for local races is typically low. In interviews, all three candidates said that Mr. Bowman’s family connection had brought extra attention to the race. They hoped turnout would be higher than in past years.
Mr. Bowman and Mr. Vance’s father, Donald Bowman, died in 2023. The half brothers did not grow up together because Mr. Vance was raised by his mother’s side of the family. But Mr. Bowman said that he had a clear memory of playing basketball with his half brother when they were young — the beginning of their friendship.
Mr. Bowman attended Mr. Vance’s inauguration in January and said that he was inspired by the vice president’s success, but did not consider him a political model.
“People are not looking for a copy-and-paste of the national administration in our city,” he said. “They’re looking for people that are going to care about the local issues.”
Mr. Vance did not respond to a request for comment, and he has not publicly endorsed Mr. Bowman for mayor. Doing so could actually hurt his half brother’s candidacy in a Democratic city.
“We’ve gotten a ‘good luck,’ a ‘congratulations,’ and he’s asked how it’s gone,” Mr. Bowman said. “But this is a race that we’re running for Cincinnati, and I think that he understands that.”
