JD Vance's Little Brother Tries His Hand at Politics. It's Not Going So Well.
CINCINNATI A lonely microphone and an empty chair sat at the end of a long, yellow cloth-draped table where Vice President JD Vances half-brother, Cory Bowman, should have been sitting. If Bowman had been there, it would have been one of a handful of key appearances ahead of the first election for potentially the first role of his nascent political career: Cincinnati mayor.
It was a Tuesday night in April inside a community center, where the local NAACP chapter was holding the second and final debate ahead of the May 6 mayoral primary. And Bowman, a local evangelical pastor, coffee shop owner and the first Republican to file to run for mayor here in 16 years, was nowhere to be found.
He had, at the moment, just landed back in the city from a trip to Fort Lauderdale, where he had posed for a photo with Patrick Bet-David, the conservative podcaster and entrepreneur with more than 5 million Instagram followers. Big things ahead! Bowman had posted the day before the debate.
In the room after the debate had ended, Bowmans absence was all folks talked about. He told us he had a scheduling conflict, so thats all I can go with. Everybody has something else to do, David Whitehead, the president of the local NAACP chapter, told me. In my opinion, you do what you feel is important.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/05/03/jd-vance-brother-cory-bowman-cincinnati-mayor-00323667