J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” book sales and viewership of the movie based off his bestseller have soared after former President Donald Trump named the Ohio Senator his vice presidential pick.
Following Trump’s announcement on Monday that Vance would be his running-mate in the 2024 election, Amazon sales for the VP nominee’s 2016 book in paperback and hardcover catapulted it to the best seller list, The Hill reported.
As of Tuesday morning, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” was in the number one and two spot on Amazon, The Hill noted. Before the announcement on Monday, the book was at number 220, the Associated Press noted.
By Monday night, the AP reported that sales for “Hillbilly Elegy” totaled at least 1.6 million copies.
By the same note, after Trump’s VP pick was announced, viewership on Netflix for the movie based on Vance’s book increased by 180% to 19.2M minutes watched on July 15, according to data from Luminate, Deadline noted. The day prior, 1.5M minutes had been watched. Translated into individual viewers, that’s 164,000 viewers on Monday compared to the 9,000 the day before.
‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Netflix views up 1000% since JD Vance named as Trump’s VP pick — No. 1 on Amazon https://t.co/EIxhmt5Cgk pic.twitter.com/XLP3r2b6y5
— New York Post (@nypost) July 16, 2024
The book is described on Amazon as “a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis – that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over 40 years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.”
“The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were ‘dirt poor and in love’ and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them,” it added. “They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility.”
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“Vance’s grandparents, his aunt, his uncle, his sister, and most of all his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America,” the description continued. “Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.”
The book was later turned into a movie by director Ron Howard in 2020 and stars Gabriel Basso, Glenn Close, and Amy Adams.
Related: ‘Very Confident Pick’: Ben Shapiro Reacts To Trump Picking J.D. Vance As Running Mate
