Some politicians live in fear that old, racist posts they made on social media years ago will come back to haunt them in an election year. But Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) apparently feared the exact opposite might happen to him.

A week after President Barack Obama won reelection in November 2012, JD Vance, then a law student at Yale, wrote a scathing rebuke of the Republican Party in which he criticized it for being “openly hostile to non-whites” and for alienating “Blacks,