Cory Bowman was feeling inspired in January as he headed home after watching his half brother, JD Vance, be inaugurated as vice president.
The 36-year-old Bowman, who shares a father with Vance, was already active in the community, starting an evangelical church in Cincinnati’s West End and later opening a coffee shop. But he hadn’t thought politics was his calling.
Now, suddenly, he did. He decided to launch a campaign for mayor.
“There was nobody that pushed me into it, nobody that told me that this is a pathway I should go,” he said in an interview one recent morning. “But I just thought this would be a great way to help impact the city in another realm as well, because that’s always been the focus.”
Were he to pull an upset in this predominantly Democratic city, Bowman would be the latest family member of a president or vice president to serve in office. That includes the brother of Mike Pence, Trump’s first vice president, elected to Congress during their previous administration. In this case, however, Bowman says his run isn’t tied to national politics as much as a desire to improve the city.
“What I want to run as is I’m somebody that deeply loves Cincinnati,” Bowman said. “I do have a background in economics, statistics and administration, and so I can kind of see certain things with the city that we can do better at.”
Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval, who is seeking reelection, is viewed as a rising star within the Democratic Party. Pureval, 42, is a lawyer and former special assistant U.S. attorney who previously served as Hamilton County Clerk of Courts and ran for Congress. He won the 2021 mayor’s race in Ohio’s third largest city with nearly 66% of the vote.
Bowman, a Republican, said he chose to run for mayor partly because it was the seat most immediately up for grabs and partly because it bothered him that Pureval was running unopposed. Another GOP candidate — procurement professional Brian Frank, 66 — jumped into the race around that same time for the same reason, setting up a three-way primary next month.
Cincinnati mayoral races are nonpartisan, so the top two vote-getters on May 6 will face each other in November.
“I think it’s fantastic that I’m not running unopposed,” Pureval said, saying he believes it’s important for Cincinnati voters to have different visions from which to choose.
He was standing outside the ribbon-cutting on a new apartment complex downtown that had just opened inside the former Macy’s headquarters. It’s the type of transformation Pureval cites among his accomplishments, also pointing to the city’s growing population and double-digit drop in violent crime.
Bowman moved to Cincinnati around 2020 and did not vote in the last mayor’s race. Pureval made an issue of his opponent’s relatively short time as a city resident to suggest “he doesn’t necessarily have a track record or a deep commitment to the city, or relationships in that way.”
Bowman grew up on a farm outside Hamilton, about 25 miles (40.23 kilometers) north. He said his family “always considered Cincinnati our home, this area our home, this (Ohio River) valley.”
He said his family bounced back and forth a lot between Ohio and Florida, because their father, Donald Bowman, who died in 2023, was a custom home builder.
Cory Bowman attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he earned a degree in economics and business administration, then returned to Florida to study the ministry at River University in Tampa. It was there that he met his wife, who’s from Oklahoma, and “convinced her to love Cincinnati as much as me.”
They moved back and started The River Church Cincinnati, where they are co-pastors, then opened Kings Arms Coffee two years later. Vance, who was born in Middletown, Ohio, had moved back to the state a little earlier. He and his wife, Usha, bought their house in Cincinnati in 2018.
According to Vance’s best-selling memoir, “ Hillbilly Elegy,” Donald Bowman’s other children were more or less strangers to him when he was a child. Vance’s biological father had given him up for adoption and his mother even changed his name to erase any memory of the man from their lives.
But Cory Bowman says that Vance eventually remedied the situation. When he was 13, he asked to meet Donald Bowman and his younger brother and sister. Cory remembers fondly the future vice president coming to visit and the two of them playing basketball.
They’ve since developed a strong bond, he said, strengthened through going to college in Ohio at around the same time and getting married and becoming parents in tandem. Both have three children — two boys and a girl, ages 7, 5 and 3. Bowman’s wife, Jordan, is expecting their fourth child in June.
Vance, 40, is not taking an active role in the campaign. The vice president’s office declined to comment on Bowman’s run, and Bowman has acknowledged that he does not have Vance’s endorsement — at least not yet.
“As far as the relationship with JD, I tell people he’s my brother, he’s not a political counselor to me,” Bowman said. “He is not somebody that planted me here in this city.”
At campaign events and debates, Bowman opposed Cincinnati’s sanctuary city status, promised to keep children safe and pledged to improve snow removal and fill potholes.
Cincinnati voter Desiree Terry, 34, said that she wasn’t thinking about local government right now because, in her words, “the world is exploding.”
But if she votes in the mayoral race, she’ll probably choose Pureval. Asked about supporting a relative of Vance’s, Terry said, “It’s a no.”
“I just think he’s helping with the chaos and I don’t want chaos locally,” she said. “It’s already all around us, but it’s not hitting at home yet, and I feel like if he’s here it’s going to hit home, because it’s already everywhere else, so I’d rather not.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.