GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan — Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s story of overcoming personal hardship was one of the reasons former President Donald Trump tapped him to become his running mate, with the hope people in the midwestern battleground states, including Michigan, would relate to him.

Although the 39-year-old Ohio senator’s nomination acceptance speech last week at the Republican National Convention was peppered with quips at Michigan, particularly regarding football, Michigan Republicans do not appear to mind.

“It’s all fun and games,” Jill Kindig, a Brighton, Michigan, resident, told the Washington Examiner on Saturday outside Trump’s rally in Grand Rapids, his first since last week’s assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania and Vance’s first as a vice presidential candidate.

“They have that joke all the time,” Sierra Ackerman, an Ohio resident who came to Michigan for the event, said outside Van Andel Arena downtown.

“That’s been going on for years on top of years,” David Martinez, a Muskegon, Michigan, resident, added. “I’ve got relatives that played for Ohio State. I’ve got a granddaughter at Michigan, I’ve got a granddaughter and daughter at Michigan State. So it doesn’t matter. Come on, you know, we’re American, we’ve got to have that rivalry in football.”

Most of Vance’s banter is based on the football rivalry between the University of Michigan and the Ohio State University.

“I heard some ‘O-H’s but I’m going to respect Michigan and not respond here,” Vance told the crowd during one of his two appearances onstage. “To my Ohio brethren: Guys, we’ve got to win Michigan. That’s the most important thing this election cycle.”

Michigan’s importance to the 2024 election was underscored by aides choosing it as Vance’s first rally as the Republican vice presidential nominee. For President Joe Biden, or whoever might replace him as the Democratic presidential nominee, the so-called “blue wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where last week’s convention was, will be crucial to securing 270 Electoral College votes in November. That is where polling is still within the margin of error between Biden and Trump, compared to the other battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, and even Nevada, which has not supported a Republican in a presidential election since then-President George W. Bush in 2004, where the GOP nominee is ahead. Biden’s campaign has also described the blue wall as his “clearest path” back to the White House.

Trump has a 1.7-percentage-point lead on Biden in Michigan, according to RealClearPolitics‘s aggregation of head-to-head polling, with Trump’s advantages over Biden in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin widening since their debate and Democratic calls for the president to step aside as the party’s nominee. Biden’s standing in Michigan had earlier been jeopardized by his response to the Israel–Hamas war in the Gaza Strip because of the state’s large Arab American and Muslim communities.

David Cohen, a politics professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, reiterated that Trump had picked Vance to campaign in the Midwest, amplifying the former president’s message of economic populism and social conservatism — policy positions that helped him crack the blue wall in 2016 against then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

“Though Ohio is not a battleground state this year, Ohio’s neighbors of Michigan and Pennsylvania are — and they are perhaps the two most critical swing states in 2024,” Cohen told the Washington Examiner. “Vance’s story plays well in these places — particularly in the rural, blue-collar areas of the Midwest.

“It is interesting that he played up the Ohio-Michigan rivalry at the RNC convention,” he said. “I’d be surprised if he talked about his graduating from the Ohio State University while in Michigan — I’m pretty sure that would not go over well with the crowd.”

During his convention address, Vance joked that the Ohio delegates needed to “chill with the Ohio love here.”

“We’ve got to win Michigan too,” he said. “… We’ve had enough political violence.”

But Vance Patrick, the Republican Party chairman in Oakland County, Michigan, who started a counter-“Let’s Go Blue” chant on behalf of the University of Michigan, dismissed the idea the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry will undermine the senator in the Great Lake State, contending that he is “absolutely” an asset in the Midwest.

“The Michigan and Ohio delegates laughed, shook hands, and hugged after the chant,” Patrick told the Washington Examiner. “This also blew up a UoM Twitter feed, again in a good, national unity way.”

For a second Michigan Republican strategist, Vance improves the foundation on which the Trump campaign can “build an even bigger stronghold in the entire region,” given Ohio’s closeness in geography and culture to Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

“Those are must-win states and, in addition to his loyalty to the former president, J.D. knows exactly how to speak to voters in those critical states,” the strategist told the Washington Examiner. “[That is] further evidenced by their choice of Michigan as the site of their first post-convention, post-nomination rally.

“Midwest voters have been suffering under relentless inflation and coastal elites don’t recognize that,” the strategist continued. “J.D. is acutely aware of that, as well as the failures of the Biden-Harris administration, such as East Palestine,” Ohio, the site of last year’s toxic train derailment, which Biden did not travel to until this March, attracting criticism from Republicans.

Vance was raised by his grandparents in Middletown, Ohio, amid his family’s encounters with addiction and abuse before he enlisted in the Marine Corps after high school in 2003 and deployed to Iraq as a war correspondent in 2005. Vance then enrolled at Ohio State before graduating summa cum laude in two years in 2009.

Vance went on to attend Yale Law School and worked for Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), Judge David Bunning, law firm Sidley Austin, and investment firms funded by the likes of AOL co-founder Steve Case and Case’s PayPal counterpart, Peter Thiel, after he graduated in 2013. He met his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, with whom he shares three children, there when they were both students. Vance wrote the 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which recounts his experiences.

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“It’s still a little bit weird to see my name on those signs,” Vance said Saturday. “Such an honor, such an incredible honor. You think about how I grew up, and you think about nobody in my immediate family had ever gone to college, and here I am getting to represent this ticket in the great state of Michigan, getting an opportunity to earn your vote as the next vice president of the United States. What a great country this is.”

Vance’s first solo rally will be Monday in Middletown.