And, of course, the list should include Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who is aching to debate Vance. “Listen, J.D. Vance is a phony,” says Beshear. “He’s fake.”

Beshear makes that argument for all the usual reasons that serious observers do when discussing Vance’s wildly cynical journey from Trump critic to Trump running mate. Recalling Vance’s 2016 fretting about the prospect that Trump might become “America’s Hitler,” Beshear said on CNN Monday, “I mean, he first says that Donald Trump is like Hitler, and now he’s acting like he’s Lincoln.”

But Beshear adds a regional twist that really gets under the skin of Vance, a Yale Law School–educated millionaire who made his name nationally by writing the 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which highlighted his family ties to Kentucky and rural Appalachia.

Vance acknowledges that his actual hometown—before he moved to California and became a high-flying venture capitalist—was Middletown, Ohio, a historic industrial city with a population of more than 50,000. But he plays the Kentucky card hard when telling his story, and that doesn’t sit well with Beshear.

After Vance joked at a rally on Monday about how he drinks diet Mountain Dew and suggested that Democrats who call him a racist for doing so, Beshear took the Republican apart.

“What was weird was him joking about racism today and then talking about diet Mountain Dew. Who drinks diet Mountain Dew?” said Beshear.

“But in all seriousness, he ain’t from here. He is not from Kentucky. This is a guy who would come maybe in the summers for some period of time, or to weddings or funerals.

“And then he claims to be from eastern Kentucky, writes a book about it to profit off our people. And then he calls us lazy. This especially makes me angry about our people in eastern Kentucky. These are the hard-working coal miners who powered the industrial revolution. He calls them lazy and acts like he understands our culture and he’s one of us. He’s not. This is a guy who went out to Silicon Valley and trying to be an Every Man. He ain’t one of us.”

That freaked out the Trump-Vance campaign, which announced, “Unlike Beshear, who rode his father’s coat tails into the governor’s mansion, Senator Vance has had to earn everything he’s accomplished in this life.” Then Vance claimed Beshear “inherited the governorship from his father.”

That’s an interesting claim coming from Vance, a wealthy and ambitious politician who, as CBS News reported, “assiduously courted billionaires and Silicon Valley titans to bankroll his unlikely rise from bestselling memoirist of despair, drugs and generational poverty in Appalachia to a ticket that could seat him a heartbeat away from the presidency.” One of those billionaires, Peter Thiel, donated $15 million to Vance’s 2022 bid for the Ohio Senate seat he now holds.

It’s true that Beshear is the son of a former Kentucky governor, but he wasn’t gifted his job on a silver platter. His father, Steve Beshear, served from 2007 to 2015. He left the post and a Republican won it, which came as no surprise in Kentucky, where Republicans have won the vast majority of state posts in recent elections. But Andy Beshear won it back with a 2019 campaign in which he ousted the Republican incumbent. Vance plays fast and loose with the facts, just as he shifts a lot of his positions—even about his scandal-plagued running mate, Donald Trump. “The problem with J.D. Vance,” Beshear told CNN, “is he has no conviction, but I guess his running mate has 34.”