About
J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) has served as Ohio’s junior senator since 2023—his first experience in public office. After only a year and a half in the Senate, he accepted Trump’s invitation to become his 2024 running mate.
Once a self-described “never-Trumper,” the GOP candidate for vice president did an about-face in 2021 when he entered the Senate race in Ohio and largely owes his 2022 win to Trump’s eventual endorsement (which came with the ex-president’s boast that Vance had been “kissing my a–” in his efforts to earn that endorsement). In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Vance was an outspoken Trump critic, referring to him publicly as an “idiot” and “reprehensible,” and texting a former roommate that Trump was either a “cynical asshole” or “America’s Hitler.” But five years later, he marketed himself as an “America First” candidate and a “Rust Belt working-class conservative” when he ran for the Senate.
Speaking on a conservative podcast during that campaign, Vance offered this recommendation to the former president: “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” Much of his rhetoric aligns with the vision set forth in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for major reforms of American institutions and society during a second Trump administration.
During his short political tenure, Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, has become a prominent figure in “the New Right” — a “MAGA firebrand” on the intellectual fringe who, by his own admission, is “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures” and heavily influenced by a number of extremist thinkers he calls friends, including Patrick Deneen and Peter Thiel (the venture capitalist who funded his 2022 Senate campaign), along with right-wing think tanks such as the Claremont Institute and The Heritage Foundation.
Vance’s political positions on key issues appear to be even more extreme than Trump’s, though he is quickly attempting to backpedal on many of them after officially joining the GOP ticket. The 39-year-old father of three is not only totally anti-abortion (earning an A+ rating from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America), but equates the procedure with murder; he is not only pro-gun, but vows to abolish the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the government agency that enforces federal gun laws; he wants to build the wall Trump failed to bring to fruition and is in favor of deporting the 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S. An isolationist, Vance is against U.S. support for Ukraine and in favor of arming Israel with more precision-guided weapons. He doesn’t believe that humans are responsible for climate change, but in the same breath says, “I absolutely want us to have clean energy” and then pushes for boosting America’s exploitation of fossil fuels in order to achieve energy “dominance.”
Vance joined the Marines after graduating from high school in 2003, earned a political science degree from Ohio State before moving on to Yale, and a decade later worked as a venture capitalist, including a year at Thiel’s firm Mithril Capital. In 2016, he gained national attention with the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, his populist manifesto and bestselling memoir about growing up poor in the Rust Belt.
After the 2020 presidential election, Vance followed Trump’s lead and adhered to the GOP playbook by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the process and making claims of fraud unfounded by facts.
January 6, 2021
- On the first anniversary of the January 6, 2021, insurrection, Vance tweeted: “There are dozens of people who protested on J6 who haven’t even been charged with a crime yet [and] are being mistreated in DC prisons.” The tweet included a link to a nonprofit that raises funds to help defendants charged in the Capitol riot.
- In a February 2024 ABC interview, Vance admitted that he would not have certified the Electoral College results if he had been vice president at the time. “I would have told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” he said.
- In a May 2024 interview with CNN, Vance said that he was “truly skeptical that Mike Pence’s life was ever in danger,” and that “politics people like to really exaggerate things from time to time.”
The Big Lie
- Vance has helped spread the conspiracy theory that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg threw the election in favor of Biden by spending $420 million “buying up local boards of elections in battleground states.” Using the MAGA ploy of echoing Democratic rhetoric about the 2020 election, he said, “We have a fake country right now. If a billionaire can go and buy up votes in our biggest geographies and tilt an election—transform who can be president—it’s really, really dangerous stuff.”
- Speaking about the 2020 election, Vance told The Vindicator in 2021, “There were certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis.” He also claimed that “it’s probably true that Trump won by a larger margin in Ohio,” implying without any evidence that some sort of voter fraud had kept Trump’s margin of victory at 8%.
- In May 2024, Vance told CNN that he would accept the November election results only “if we have a free and fair election.” He essentially hedged the same question in a confrontational interview on Meet the Press in early July.