JD Vance

James David "JD" Vance ( Bowman and Hamel; born August 2, 1984) is an American politician, author, and Marine veteran who has served since 2023 as the junior United States senator from Ohio. A member of the Republican Party, he is its nominee for vice president in the 2024 United States presidential election.

After high school, Vance joined the US Marine Corps, where he served from 2003 to 2007 as a combat correspondent in a non-combative role, including a six-month deployment in the public affairs department in Iraq. He attended Ohio State University afterward, graduating in 2009, then graduated in 2013 from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of ''The Yale Law Journal''. In 2016, Vance published his memoir ''Hillbilly Elegy'', which was adapted into a drama film in 2020.

Vance won the 2022 United States Senate election in Ohio, defeating Democratic nominee Tim Ryan. Initially opposed to Donald Trump's candidacy in the 2016 election, Vance has become a strong Trump supporter since Trump's presidency. In July 2024, Trump selected Vance as his running mate before the Republican National Convention.

Vance has been described as a national conservative and right-wing populist, and he describes himself as a member of the postliberal right. His political positions include opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control, and American military aid to Ukraine. Vance is an outspoken critic of childlessness, linking it to sociopathy and advocating that parents should have more voting power than non-parents.

Early life, military service, and education

James Donald Bowman was born on August 2, 1984, in Middletown, Ohio, to Beverly Carol (née Vance; born 1961) and Donald Ray Bowman (1959–2023). He is of Scots-Irish descent. His parents divorced when he was a toddler. After Bowman was adopted by his mother's third husband, Bob Hamel, his mother changed his name to James David Hamel to remove his father's name but used the name of one of her brothers to preserve his nickname, JD.

Vance has written that his childhood was marked by poverty and abuse, and that his mother struggled with drug addiction. Vance and his sister Lindsey were raised primarily by his maternal grandparents, James (1929–1997) and Bonnie Vance (née Blanton; 1933–2005), whom they called "Papaw" and "Mamaw". His grandparents on both sides moved to Ohio from Kentucky's Appalachia.

After graduating from Middletown High School in 2003, Vance enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and served as a military journalist in a non-combative role in Iraq for six months in late 2005. He completed a total of four years of service. He was part of the Public Affairs section of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing and said that his service "taught me how to live like an adult" and that he was "lucky to escape any real fighting". His decorations included the Iraq Campaign Medal, Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal and Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal. Vance achieved the rank of corporal.

Using the G.I. Bill, Vance attended Ohio State University from September 2007 to August 2009, graduating ''summa cum laude'' with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and philosophy. He finished his undergraduate studies in less than two years. During his first year in college, he worked for Republican state senator Bob Schuler.

After graduating from Ohio State, Vance attended Yale Law School. He became close friends during orientation with Jamil Jivani, a future Conservative member of Canadian parliament. During his first year, Professor Amy Chua, author of the 2011 book ''Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother'', persuaded him to begin writing his memoir, ''Hillbilly Elegy''.

Vance was an editor of ''The Yale Law Journal'' and graduated in 2013 with a Juris Doctor degree. In 2010 and 2011, he wrote for David Frum's "FrumForum" website under the name J. D. Hamel. Although ''Hillbilly Elegy'' implies that Vance adopted his grandparents' surname of Vance upon his marriage in 2014, the name change actually occurred in April 2013, as he was about to graduate from Yale.

Early career

After graduating from law school, Vance worked for Republican Senator John Cornyn. He spent a year as a law clerk for Judge David Bunning of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, then worked at the law firm Sidley Austin, beginning a brief career as a corporate lawyer. Having practiced law for slightly under two years, Vance moved to San Francisco to work in the technology industry as a venture capitalist. Between 2016 and 2017, he served as a principal at Peter Thiel's firm, Mithril Capital.

Writing

In June 2016, Harper published Vance's book, ''Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis''. It was on ''The New York Times'' Best Seller list in 2016 and 2017. ''The New York Times'' called it "one of the six best books to help understand Trump's win".

''The Washington Post'' called Vance the "voice of the Rust Belt", while ''The New Republic'' criticized him as "liberal media's favorite white trash–splainer" and the "false prophet of blue America." Economist William Easterly, a West Virginia native, criticized the book, writing: "Sloppy analysis of collections of people—coastal elites, flyover America, Muslims, immigrants, people without college degrees, you name it—has become routine. And it's killing our politics."

Vance was a CNN contributor in early 2017. In April 2017, Ron Howard signed on to direct the film version of ''Hillbilly Elegy'', which was released in select theaters on November 11, 2020. It was released on Netflix for streaming.

Our Ohio Renewal

In December 2016, Vance said he planned to move to Ohio and would consider starting a nonprofit or running for office. In Ohio, he started Our Ohio Renewal, a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization focused on education, addiction, and other "social ills" he had mentioned in his memoir. According to a 2017 archived capture of the nonprofit's website, the members of the advisory board were Keith Humphreys, Jamil Jivani, Yuval Levin, and Sally Satel. According to a 2020 capture of the website, those four remained in those positions throughout the organization's existence. Our Ohio Renewal closed after less than two years with sparse achievements. According to Jivani, the organization's director of law and policy, its work was derailed by Jivani's cancer diagnosis.

During Vance's 2022 campaign for US Senate, Tim Ryan, the Democratic nominee, said the charity was a front for Vance's political ambitions. Ryan pointed to reports that the organization paid a Vance political adviser and conducted public opinion polling, while its efforts to address addiction failed. Vance denied the characterization. A 2021 report by ''Business Insider'' revealed that Our Ohio Renewal's tax filings showed that in its first year, it spent more on "management services" provided by its executive director Jai Chabria, who also served as Vance's top political adviser, than it did on programs to fight opioid abuse.

According to the Associated Press (AP), the charity's biggest accomplishment, sending psychiatrist Sally Satel to Ohio's Appalachian region for a yearlong residency in 2018, was tainted by the ties among Satel, her employer, American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Purdue Pharma, in the form of knowledge exchange between Satel and Purdue and financial support from Purdue to AEI, as found by a ProPublica 2019 investigation. In an email to AP, Satel denied having any relationship with Purdue or any knowledge of Purdue's donations to AEI.

Investing

In 2017, Vance joined the investment firm Revolution LLC. It was founded by Steve Case, who also cofounded AOL. Vance was tasked with expanding the "Rise of the Rest" initiative, which focuses on growing investments in underserved regions outside Silicon Valley and New York City. In 2019, Vance co-founded Narya Capital in Cincinnati with financial backing from Thiel, Eric Schmidt, and Marc Andreessen. In 2020, he raised $93 million for the firm. With Thiel and former Trump adviser Darren Blanton, Vance has invested in Rumble, a Canadian online video platform popular with the political right.

From March 2017 to April 2021, Vance served on the board of directors of the startup AppHarvest, which carried out indoor vertical farming in Kentucky. AppHarvest was also one of Vance's venture capitalism company Narya's first publicly announced investments. Vance publicly advocated for AppHarvest, in February 2021 telling the media that it was "not just a good investment opportunity, it's a great business that's making a big difference in the world". AppHarvest went bankrupt in 2023 while owing over $340 million. CNN, citing interviews with former AppHarvest workers, reported that the company "provided a grim job experience for many of the working-class Kentuckians Vance has vowed to help" due to employees' being "forced to work in grueling conditions inside the company's greenhouse", while AppHarvest "eventually began contracting migrant workers from Mexico, Guatemala" instead of Americans.

US Senate

2022 campaign

In early 2018, Vance considered running for the US Senate against Sherrod Brown, but did not. In March 2021, Peter Thiel gave $10 million to Protect Ohio Values, a super PAC created in February to support a potential Vance candidacy. Robert Mercer also gave an undisclosed amount. In April, Vance expressed interest in running for the Senate seat being vacated by Rob Portman. In May, he launched an exploratory committee. Vance is an ally of Republican fundraiser Nate Morris, who has also financially supported Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.

Vance announced his Senate campaign in Ohio on July 1, 2021. On May 3, 2022, he won the Republican primary with 32% of the vote, defeating multiple candidates, including Josh Mandel (23%) and Matt Dolan (22%). On November 8, in the general election, Vance defeated Democratic nominee Tim Ryan with 53% of the vote to Ryan's 47%. This vote share was considered a vast underperformance compared to other Ohio Republicans, especially in the coinciding gubernatorial election.

While Vance had often previously spelled his name with periods after the initials of his given names ("J.D.") – including in the publication of ''Hillbilly Elegy'' – he dropped this styling after becoming a candidate for office by removing the periods ("JD").

Tenure

On January 3, 2023, Vance was sworn in to the Senate as a member of the 118th United States Congress.

Data from mid-July 2024 showed that Vance had made 45 Senate speeches and sponsored 57 legislative bills, none of which had passed the Senate; he had also co-sponsored 288 bills, of which two passed both the Senate and the House, but were vetoed by President Biden.

Vance's Senate work has included:

* Co-sponsored a bill with Senator Raphael Warnock (D- GA) to lower the price of insulin.
* Collaborated with Senator Elizabeth Warren (D- MA) to claw back executive pay when big banks fail.
* Along with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA14), introduced a companion bill that would criminalize gender-affirming care for minors with penalties of up to 12 years in prison.

Vance has also voted against raising the debt ceiling, standing against final passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023.

Vance was criticized for his delayed response to the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. His office released an official statement on February 13, 2023, ten days after the derailment, though Vance had sent a message on social media about the derailment the day after it occurred.

On February 26, 2023, Vance wrote an op-ed in ''The Washington Post'' supporting the provision of PPP style funds to those affected by the derailment, which some Republican senators criticized. On March 1, 2023, Vance, Brown, and Senators John Fetterman, Bob Casey, Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio proposed bipartisan legislation to prevent derailments like the one in East Palestine.

Committee assignments

* Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs
** Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection subcommittee
** Housing, Transportation, and Community Development subcommittee
** Securities, Insurance, and Investment subcommittee
* Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation
** Communications, Media, and Broadband subcommittee
** Oceans, Fisheries, Climate Change, and Manufacturing subcommittee
** Space and Science subcommittee
* Senate Special Committee on Aging

2024 vice-presidential campaign

On January 31, 2023, Vance endorsed former President Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican Party presidential primaries. On July 15, 2024, the first day of the Republican National Convention, Trump announced that he had chosen Vance as his running mate in a post on Truth Social. On July 17, the third day of the convention, Vance accepted the nomination to be Trump's running mate.

Trump's two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, advocated for their father to choose Vance. Several media and industry figures are said to have lobbied for Vance to be on the presidential ticket, including Elon Musk, David O. Sacks, and Tucker Carlson. The Heritage Foundation, which drafted Project 2025, privately advocated for Vance to be Trump's vice-presidential pick. Musk responded to Trump's vice-presidential pick hours after its announcement, saying the ticket "resounds with victory". David Sacks, a prominent GOP donor and Silicon Valley venture capitalist, wrote on Twitter: "This is who I want by Trump's side: an American patriot." In 2022, Sacks gave Vance's Senate campaign $900,000, and Peter Thiel added $15 million. While it was initially reported that Elon Musk would contribute $45 million monthly, Musk later said he planned to donate "much lower amounts".

On May 15, 2024, Trump attended a $50,000 per head private fundraising dinner with Vance in Cincinnati. Guests included Chris Bortz and Republican fundraiser Nate Morris. Vance appeared at significant conservative political events and in June was described as a potential running mate for Trump. In July, a former friend of Vance's from Yale Law School exposed to the media communications between them and Vance from 2014 to 2017, with the friend alleging that Vance has "changed isopinion on literally every imaginable issue that affects everyday Americans" in pursuit of "political power and wealth".

In late July 2024, after President Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy for reelection and Vice President Kamala Harris became a presidential candidate, Vance said at a private fundraiser that the "bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden ... Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did"; a day later, Vance told the media: "I don't think the political calculus changes at all" whether Harris or Biden was the Democratic nominee. Following criticism of his past remarks and political positions, Vance said in an August 2024 interview that a vice president "doesn't really matter" and that "Kamala Harris has been a bad vice president". This came after Trump said that the "vice president, in terms of the election, does not have any impact".

Comments on childless women

Shortly after being named Trump's running mate, Vance was criticized for saying in a 2021 Fox News interview, "we are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too." The resurfaced comments sparked immediate backlash across news and social media. Once the comments went viral, MSNBC's ''Morning Joe'' host Mika Brzezinski mocked Vance by appearing on her show petting a cat that was sitting on her lap and asking: "My kids are older. Does that make me childless? I want to qualify." On July 26, 2024, Vance clarified his remarks on '' The Megyn Kelly Show'', saying, "It's not a criticism of people who don't have children" and "this is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child".

After backlash to the Fox News interview, additional comments that Vance made in interviews about women and childless people resurfaced. In a 2020 podcast interview, he said that being childless "makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less, less mentally stable". Vance also suggested in a March 2021 interview on ''The Charlie Kirk Show'' that people without children should be taxed at a higher rate than those with children, adding that the U.S. should "reward the things that we think are good" and "punish the things that we think are bad". In an August 2024 interview on ''Face The Nation'', Vance said he supported increasing the child tax credit from $2,000 per child up to $5,000 per child, departing from his Senate Republican colleagues, who had blocked an expanded child tax credit in the Senate two weeks earlier.

''Hillbilly Elegy'' masturbation hoax

On July 15, 2024, an Internet hoax spread from social network X falsely claiming that ''Hillbilly Elegy'' described Vance masturbating using a latex glove placed between couch cushions. Internet memes were generated in response, and the viral hoax's spread was amplified after the Associated Press published and promptly deleted a fact-check of it. In a rally on August 6, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who had been chosen as Harris's running mate earlier that day, obliquely referenced the hoax while challenging Vance to a debate. The Harris campaign's acknowledgement of the hoax and willingness to use it as an attack line received significant media coverage, with some using it as an example of part of a broader messaging shift in the campaign.

Public reactions

The week after the Republican convention, opinion polls average showed Vance with a −6 net approval, vastly below the average of +19 that major-party vice-presidential nominees have averaged since 2000 in post-convention opinion polls. That week, Vance's middling public reception and other concerns led some prominent Republican politicians and political scientists to say that Vance may have been a poor choice of running mate, especially in light of the election's dynamics shifting upon the withdrawal of President Biden from the election and advent of Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee.

Political positions

Personal life

Vance wrote in his memoir, ''Hillbilly Elegy'', that he was raised in a low-income family by his single mother and grandmother and his family had a difficult life in his hometown, Middletown, Ohio, where his mother's parents had moved from Kentucky. As a child, he longed for "the American dream, with a happy family at its core", and admired Bill Clinton for his similar background, noting that Clinton had been "a poor boy with a vaguely Southern accent, raised by a single mother, with a heavy dose of loving grandparents."

Around 2011, Vance met his wife, Usha Chilukuri, while both were students at Yale Law School. He has called her "my Yale spirit guide". In 2014, they married in Kentucky, in an interfaith marriage ceremony, as she is Hindu and he Christian. Their wedding included a Bible reading by Vance's "best friend", Jamil Jivani, and the bride and groom were blessed by a Hindu pandit. The couple have three children.

After graduating from Yale, Vance and his wife moved to San Francisco, where he worked with a venture capital firm for a few years and she joined a law practice. In 2017, Vance wrote in ''The New York Times'' that, as someone who had yearned for the American dream as a child, he found hope in Barack Obama's personal story, which showed that domestic hardships need not defeat us; Vance also saw similarities in terms of his own early personal accomplishments: "a prestigious law degree, a strong professional career, and a modicum of fame as a writer", though he noted his political disagreements with Obama.

Vance was raised in a "conservative, evangelical" branch of Protestantism. By September 2016, he was "not an active participant" in any particular Christian denomination, but was "thinking very seriously about converting to Catholicism". In August 2019, Vance was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church in a ceremony at St. Gertrude Priory in Cincinnati, Ohio. He chose Augustine of Hippo as his confirmation saint. Vance said he converted because he "became persuaded over time that Catholicism was true ..and Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way", further describing Catholic theology's influence on his political views. Vance was influenced to convert to Catholicism by Peter Thiel.

Electoral history

Works

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Notes

References

External links

JD Vance
official US Senate website

Campaign website

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J.D. Vance
at PolitiFact

{{DEFAULTSORT:Vance, J. D.

1984 births
Living people
2024 United States vice-presidential candidates
21st-century American businesspeople
21st-century American legislators
21st-century American male writers
21st-century Roman Catholics
21st-century American memoirists
21st-century Ohio politicians
American people of Scotch-Irish descent
American venture capitalists
American Zionists
Businesspeople from Ohio
Catholics from Ohio
Converts to Roman Catholicism from Evangelicalism
Donald Trump 2024 presidential campaign
Members of the 118th United States Congress
Military personnel from Ohio
Middletown High School (Ohio) alumni
Ohio Republicans
Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences alumni
People from Middletown, Ohio
Republican Party (United States) vice presidential nominees
Republican Party United States senators from Ohio
Right-wing populists in the United States
Roman Catholic activists
United States congressional aides
United States Marine Corps personnel of the Iraq War
United States Marine Corps non-commissioned officers
Writers from Ohio
Yale Law School alumni