Following the great news that Ohio Senator JD Vance will be former President Donald Trump’s running mate in the 2024 election, sales of Vance’s 2016 memoir and expose on the threats facing Appalachia, “Hillbilly Elegy,” has rocketed right back up the non-fiction segment of the New York Times Bestseller’s list.
As background, the book mainly revolves around Sen. Vance’s hard time growing up in the heart of Appalachia, the small town of Middletown, Ohio. In the book, he tells the story of how his grandma raised him because his mother, who is now sober and on good terms, was addicted to the pills that plague the region and thus out of the home while in and out of rehab.
The book has been quite popular since it came out, with many on the populist right using it as an example of how the once proud and functional Scots-Irish in Appalachia, the descendants of Scotland’s border reivers and the group that fills the ranks of America’s military, were brought low by globalization shipping their jobs away and pill pushers addicting them to opiates on behalf of the Sacklers and similar opioid producers.
But while it has been popular for a long time, it has skyrocketed since his announcement, with a reported three-quarters of a million copies selling since former President Trump made the announcement on July 15, just days after he was almost assassinated, that JD Vance would be his running-mate.
In fact, the book’s popularity quickly picked back up, with it selling a remarkable 200,000 paperback copies by just July 20. Those immense sales have sent it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for non-fiction and, according to Circana Bookscan, have made it the best-selling print book across all genres.
Those were major jumps for a book that was selling just 1,500 copies a week prior to the announcement, and sales are even larger once digital versions, such as the e-book and audiobook, which Sen. Vance himself narrates, are factored in. But the book has been popular for years and sold somewhere in the neighborhood of three million copies. It was also turned into a movie directed by Ron Howard.
The memoir’s continued popularity makes sense given that Sen. Vance is now connected with the populist MAGA movement, which focuses on many of the same issues he lays out in it, such as how the white working class has been obliterated by social and economic change, offering his perspective on that through the lens of his own, downtrodden family.
Sen. Vance also, on that same note, delves into how people in the region have been overlooked and largely lost their shot at the American dream because of the aforementioned social and economic trends, with poverty and addiction to the pills pushed on them destroying communities and ruining life for many in the region.
What makes the memoir particularly powerful is that Sen. Vance uses both his family’s experiences and broader descriptions of trends to tell the story, showing through anecdotal and broader stories how people in the region have been abandoned by the American system that they are theoretically part of. For obvious reasons, that strikes home with MAGA Americans.