Cory Bowman says he wants to be mayor of Cincinnati. He might have other things in mind.
A lonely microphone and an empty chair sat at the end of a long, yellow cloth-draped table where Vice President JD Vance’s 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.