Cory Bowman, vice president JD Vance’s half-brother, has withdrawn his petition to run for mayor of Cincinnati, he told The Enquirer, part of the USA TODAY Network, exclusively on Tuesday.
Bowman, 36, lives in Cincinnati’s College Hill neighborhood, serves as pastor of The River Church in the West End neighborhood, and is a registered Republican. The mayor’s race has not included a Republican candidate since 2009.
Bowman, who grew up in Ohio counties north of Cincinnati, returned to the city with his wife and children in 2020. He and his wife established their church in the West End that same year. Bowman also co-owns Kings Arms Coffee, a neighborhood coffee shop.
“My heart fell in love with it,” he said of the West End.
Bowman, who has been pastoring a nondenominational Christian church in Cincinnati for four years, says he has considered a role in local government as a way to give back to the city.
However, attending Vance and President Donald Trump’s inauguration last month provided additional inspiration.
“There’s nobody that cheered louder when he was getting sworn in than me, because he’s my brother,” said the candidate.
JD Vance ‘an incredible role model of mine’
Bowman stated that he discussed running for mayor with his older half-brother, Vance, in the “initial stages”. He stated that his brother has inspired him, and they have a friendly sibling rivalry.
“I don’t always speak for my brother because he speaks well for himself. And he’s doing well,” he explained. “I will say that he’s an incredible role model of mine.”
Bowman stated that he is running to give Cincinnati voters a choice for mayor. Eight candidates, including Democratic Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval, have filed petitions to run for mayor, but have yet to submit the required 500 signatures. The deadline to submit the required signatures is February 20.
Pureval, who is finishing his first term as mayor, told The Enquirer that he is running again and has started hosting fundraisers.
The mayoral race is a nonpartisan field race in which the top two vote-getters advance from the primary. If fewer than three candidates run, there will be no primary.
Bowman attended the Republican National Convention in July, where Vance was officially named Trump’s running mate.
“Half of those people (who were there) wouldn’t have been caught dead in that room eight years ago,” he told me. “It wasn’t just established Republicans, it was more so people wanting a change.”
However, Bowman is not one of the new Republicans. He stated that he mostly agrees with conservative values.
He cited “red tape” stifling development and the concentration of low-income housing in the West End, which prompted ten residents to file a federal housing complaint against the city last year, as issues he wants to address as mayor.
Brad Wenstrup, the last Republican to run for mayor of Cincinnati, did so in 2009. He went on to win a seat in the United States House. In 2023, voters elected an all-Democrat, nine-member council, ousting popular Republican Liz Keating.
Cincinnati Democrats: We don’t need ‘chaos’ coming from Trump
When asked about Bowman’s run, Hamilton County Democratic Party Chairman Alex Linser responded, “Who?”
“That’s the beauty of our system,” Linser said. “Anyone can run for Mayor. Mayor Pureval has done an excellent job, and anyone can see that the city is run better now than when he took office.”
“The voters of Cincinnati have put a lot of trust in Democratic leaders,” she said. “It is a safe, well-managed city in which to raise a family. We don’t need the chaos that the Trump presidency is bringing to City Hall.”
Who is JD Vance’s half-brother, Cory Bowman?
Vance and Bowman have the same father, Donald Bowman. He was the second husband of Vance’s mother, Beverly Aikins. Donald died in 2023.
Although Donald placed Vance for adoption when he was in kindergarten, as a teenager, Vance formed a bond with his father and half-siblings, including Cory.
He also spent a few weeks one summer living with the family in their Preble County farmhouse, which had cows, horses, and dogs. In his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance described the contrast between living with his mother, who struggled with substance use, and idyllic farm life with his father.
“It was a great childhood,” Cory Bowman said. “We learned those foundations as children. But there was always something about the city that intrigued me.”
In his book, Vance referred to his father, Donald, as a “devout Christian,” and Cory Bowman also described him as religious.
Donald’s religion and church inspired teenage Vance to experiment with his religious beliefs, which at the time included throwing out his heavy rock CDs and arguing against evolution online, according to Vance’s book. He converted to Catholicism as an adult.
Vance’s mother, Aikins, remarried and changed his name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel. Vance later took his grandfather’s surname.
