Vice President JD Vance’s half-brother, a Republican pastor and coffee shop owner, is running for mayor of heavily Democratic Cincinnati.
“Weeks ago, my flight touched down at CVG, returning home from the most monumental inauguration in my generation,” Cory Bowman, 36, wrote in an announcement on Instagram on Tuesday. “When I landed, I knew the city where my family and I live and love cannot fall behind in the critical years ahead.”
Bowman grew up in rural Ohio and moved in 2020 to Cincinnati, where he and his wife founded The River Church, a nondenominational Christian church that preaches the Rapture and the second coming of Christ, as well as encourages speaking in tongues.
Cincinnati’s Democratic incumbent Mayor Aftab Pureval, a 42-year-old attorney, also plans to run for re-election, USA Today reported. The nine-member city council is all Democrats, and a Republican hasn’t run for mayor since 2009.
Bowman and Vance, 40, share the same father, Donald Bowman, according to USA Today. Donald Bowman and Vance’s mother, Beverly Aikins, divorced when Vance was a toddler, and Aikins remarried.
In his book Hillbilly Elegy, Vance wrote that Bowman also remarried, had two more children and then gave Vance up for adoption. The father and son reconnected later when Vance was a teen, and Bowman said he’d never wanted to give up Vance in the first place, according to the Today Show.
Vance then developed a relationship with his half-siblings and spent a few weeks at the Bowman family farm, according to USA Today. Donald Bowman—who was a Pentecostal Christian—also inspired Vance to experiment with his religious views. Vance converted to Catholicism five years ago and has described himself as “devout.”
Cory Bowman had attended the Republican National Convention in July and contemplated running for local office. But Vance and President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January convinced him to enter the race.
“There’s nobody that cheered louder when he was getting sworn in than me, because he’s my brother,” Bowman told USA Today. “He’s an incredible role model of mine.”
But local Democratic leaders were skeptical about MAGA coming to town.
“The voters of Cincinnati have put a lot of trust in Democratic leaders,” local party Chairman Alex Linser told USA Today. “It is a safe, well-run city where you can raise a family. We don’t need the kind of chaos that is coming out of the Trump presidency infiltrating City Hall.”
