How J.D. Vance Became the Veepstakes Favorite

Editor’s Note, July 15, 2024: We are re-upping this profile of J.D. Vance—originally published on July 12, 2024—in light of the news that Donald Trump has selected the senator from Ohio to serve as his running mate. We will have more coverage of the selection—from the convention in Milwaukee—shortly.

“Never be like these f—ing losers who think the deck is stacked against them,” J.D. Vance’s grandmother often told him when he was a child. “You can do anything you want to do.”

To read Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy in 2016 was to admire Mamaw, Vance’s strong-willed and charmingly vulgar grandmother who gave him the much-needed stability he didn’t get from a drug-addicted mother who cycled through several husbands and live-in boyfriends. To read Hillbilly Elegy again in 2024 is to sit in awe and wonder at the unrelenting ambition of J.D. Vance himself.

By the time Vance graduated from high school, he writes in his memoir, he had aced the SAT but didn’t think he had the discipline to succeed in college, so he enlisted in the Marines instead. After completing his service, which included a deployment to Iraq as a public-affairs specialist, Vance breezed through Ohio State University in a little less than two years, graduating summa cum laude. Then Vance became a Yale Law School graduate, D.C. lawyer, freelance policy wonk, venture capitalist, and New York Times best-selling author.

Vance climbed the ladder of success not just by his own grit and talent, but by learning to adapt to a foreign culture. “[S]ocial mobility isn’t just about money and economics; it’s about a lifestyle change,” he wrote. “The wealthy and powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores.”

Vance’s ability to adapt has served him well in his two post-Hillbilly Elegy political campaigns—both of which were aimed at earning the vote of one man. 

In 2022, Vance won the Ohio GOP Senate nomination by securing the decisive endorsement of Donald Trump, and two years later the 39-year-old senator is the odds-on favorite to be selected as Trump’s running mate. If Trump picks Vance and wins in November, Vice President Vance would become the prohibitive favorite for the GOP presidential nomination in 2028. And he would have a non-trivial chance of becoming president before then. (Trump turns 82 in 2028.)

Winning over the former president was no small feat for Vance, who called Trump  “noxious,”  “reprehensible,” an “idiot,” and “cultural heroin” during the 2016 campaign. “What percentage of the American population has @RealDonaldTrump sexually assaulted?” Vance asked in one 2016 tweet that has been deleted. “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” Vance wrote in a text message to a friend at the time.

But when Vance launched his Senate campaign in 2021, he begged Trump and Republican voters for forgiveness. “I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy,” Vance told Fox News viewers that July. “I think he was a good president.” Trump is “the leader of this movement,” Vance told Time magazine, “and if I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him.” A Vance spokesman declined an interview request with the senator for this article.

Before Vance had even launched his campaign, he leveraged his connections among the MAGA elite to woo Trump. In March 2021, Peter Thiel, Vance’s billionaire patron and onetime venture capitalist employer, brought Vance to Mar-a-Lago for a meeting with Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. A Vance ally told The Dispatch that at the Vance-Trump meeting, Trump “busted his balls about the 2016 stuff, and then they just shot the shit for an hour and a half.” Donald Trump Jr. had already liked what he had seen of Vance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program, according to the Vance ally, and Trump Jr. told friends he was a fan of Vance’s book and never understood why Vance didn’t support his father in 2016.

The extent to which Vance transformed himself to win over Trump is somewhat more nuanced than one might expect. On an ideological level, he always had a populist streak. Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute first met Vance a few years before the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, when he was a young Washington lawyer interested in public policy. “What strikes me from that time is actually mostly continuity. I’d say J.D. was always a populist-minded conservative,” Levin said. “His thinking was about how working-class people could be part of the Republican coalition.” On foreign policy, Vance wrote in a Facebook comment during the 2012 presidential primary that isolationist Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s “ideas on national defense are downright scary. If he get[s] the nomination I will donate every spare dollar I have to Barack Obama—at least he believes in a strong national defense.” But Levin recalls that before 2016, Vance was “already quite skeptical of military intervention.” Vance expressed disdain over George W. Bush’s foreign-policy record in a February 2016 USA Today op-ed—even as he concluded in the same article that Trump’s policies range from “immoral to absurd.”

There’s no doubt, however, that the Vance who sought the GOP Senate nomination was far different temperamentally than the Vance who wrote Hillbilly Elegy. 

The J.D. Vance who wrote Hillbilly Elegy “worried about racial prejudice in my own family and friends,” but the J.D. Vance running for Senate in 2022 said Georgia congresswoman and conspiracy-theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, who endorsed Vance, “did nothing wrong” when she spoke at a conference sponsored by the virulent anti-Semite Nick Fuentes. The central sociological point of Hillbilly Elegy was that the problems facing the white working class were primarily cultural. The solution to those problems, Vance wrote in the conclusion of the book, “starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.” When Vance launched his Senate campaign, he told the crowd of Ohioans: “The elites plunder this country and then blame us for it in the process.” 

As a blogger for FrumForum.com while a Yale Law student, Vance preferred moderate Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman to Texas conservative Rick Perry, praised Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget, and wrote: “Of all the things I can’t stand about politics, the tendency to emotionalize a difficult topic is probably the worst.” As a Senate candidate, Vance often aped Trump’s aggressive and nasty style. “Honored to have Marjorie’s endorsement. We’re going to win this thing and take the country back from the scumbags,” Vance tweeted in response to receiving the endorsement of Greene in January 2022. “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” Vance said on Steve Bannon’s podcast days before Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Retired U.S. Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who commanded the 24th Infantry Division in the first Iraq war, replied on Twitter that Vance was a “shameful person unsuitable for public office.” Vance responded: “Your entire time in military leadership we won zero wars. You drank fine wine at bullshit security conferences while thousands of working class kids died on the battlefield. Oh, by the way, how much do you stand to gain financially from a war with Russia, Barry?”

The Russia-Ukraine war ultimately helped Vance win Trump’s endorsement. When Vance’s leading opponent, Josh Mandel, endorsed a no-fly zone in Ukraine enforced by NATO allies, Donald Trump Jr. decided to throw his support behind Vance and encourage his father to endorse Vance. The former president also liked how Vance handled himself in debates and looked on TV, calling him a “handsome son of a b—-,” according to Politico. The endorsement proved decisive with Vance beating Mandel 32 percent to 24 percent in a multi-candidate primary.

But there was a political cost (to say nothing of the moral cost) of courting Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Donald Trump. Vance won the November general election by 6 points, but every other Republican on the statewide ballot won by 12 to 25 points. Vance’s performance was a couple points worse than Trump’s 8-point victory in Ohio in 2020. The Vance ally told The Dispatch it’s “embarrassingly wrong” to compare Vance’s performance to the victory of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who was an incumbent with a well-known mainstream GOP pedigree and faced an opponent with few resources. It’s true that Vance faced a bruising GOP primary and his Democratic opponent, Tim Ryan, was well-funded, but it’s also true that Vance’s efforts to court Marjorie Taylor Greene and trying to out-Trump Trump helped Ryan raise money and made those anti-Vance ads more effective. (Mitch McConnell’s super PAC spent more than $30 million to support Vance.)

There’s no denying, however, that Vance’s approach to 2022 set him up well for the veepstakes in 2024. “J.D. is kissing my ass he wants my support so bad,” Trump said at a September 2022 rally with Vance. The Republican party is, of course, full of Trump ass-kissers. What made Vance so skilled at the practice that he became the veepstakes frontrunner before turning 40?

For starters, he never let up. The day after the 2022 midterm election, when many Republicans were blaming Trump for the underwhelming electoral performance and looking at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a 2024 alternative, Vance’s campaign told the Trump campaign he would be endorsing the former president, according to a Vance ally. In February 2023, Vance endorsed Trump in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Vance’s relationship with Donald Trump Jr. also deepened after November 2022, and the president’s eldest son has been firmly behind J.D. for VP. On his podcast this week, Trump Jr. warned that if someone like Marco Rubio was Trump’s vice president, RINOs in the Senate might vote to convict Trump in an impeachment because they’d prefer a President Rubio (but not President Vance) to Trump. “There is something about having someone from outside the establishment to sort of further protect you from that establishment,” he said. (Though, Trump Jr. “joked,” if his father really wanted to be assassination-proof, he’d need Vice President Donald Trump Jr.) Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Charlie Kirk have also been lobbying Trump to pick Vance, according to the Wall Street Journal.

But the backing of the MAGA elites would probably not be enough by itself for Trump to give Vance the nod. Trump has been impressed by the well-spoken Yale Law graduate’s media appearances on a wide variety of programs over several months, and Trump simply gets along with Vance, according to a Vance ally. “He looks like a young Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said of Vance this week. Vance has also demonstrated an ability to fundraise: One event with billionaire David Sacks last month raised $12 million for Trump. 

While it’s unclear at the moment whether Trump will pick Vance, one can be fairly certain what the Democratic campaign against him would look like. A fair amount of attention will be devoted to Vance’s opposition to Ukraine aid—a Marquette Law School poll found voters in the key battleground state of Wisconsin back the aid by a 22-point margin. On abortion, Democrats will, like Tim Ryan did during the Ohio Senate race, focus on Vance’s comments on abortion in the case of rape. Asked whether he supports abortion ban exceptions for rape, Vance said: “Two wrongs don’t make a right. At the end of day we are talking about an unborn baby. What kind of society do we want to have? A society that looks at unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded?” But the federal 15-week limit abortion he supported included a rape exception, and he later said in a debate with Ryan that he supports reasonable exceptions. (The other two leading VP contenders, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, have similar vulnerabilities on the issue.) Last week, Vance aligned himself with Trump when he said he supports access to the abortion drug mifepristone.

And much attention will focus on threats to democracy and liberalism. In October 2021, Vance falsely claimed to an Ohio newspaper that in the 2020 presidential election “there were certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis,” and he has said that if he had been in Mike Pence’s shoes on January 6, 2021, he would have tried to send back the Electoral College results to the states. A self-described “post-liberal,” according to Vanity Fair Vance said on a podcast in 2021: “We are in a late republican period … If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”* Vance said he would support the president firing “every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” and if the Supreme Court tried to stop him, “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

In other words, a Vance VP nomination presents the prospect not just of gambling on Trump for another four years, but of potentially handing the Republican Party over to postliberalism for a generation—assuming Vice President Vance wouldn’t change his political persona to adapt to different circumstances yet again.

Correction, July 12, 2024: This article has been updated to reflect that two quotations from J.D. Vance were from a 2021 podcast.