When former President Donald Trump named Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his vice presidential nominee on Monday, it was a projection of confidence. Vance, whose meteoric political rise began when he was elected to the Senate in 2022, is well known for his pugilistic defenses of Trump, his occasional embrace of populist rhetoric, and his conservative views on social issues. He is a firebrand with ties to right-leaning tech moguls—including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel—and a knack for defending the former president.
Trump’s choice of Vance is not an entreaty to voters on the fence but a signal to all Americans, and especially Republicans, that the GOP remade in Trump’s image will extend beyond 2024.
“It is hard to imagine a cleaner break from the pre-Trump Republican Party than the Trump-Vance [ticket],” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist. “[Trump] is reaffirming and reinforcing his vision of the party and seeing it reflected all the way down.”
In some respects, the Republican presidential ticket comprises two men with very different life experiences and paths to power. At 39 years old, Vance is exactly half Trump’s age. Rather than a scion of a wealthy New York real estate mogul, Vance is a child of the Midwest who earned notoriety—and a movie adaptation of his life—for his autobiography depicting his family’s struggles with poverty and drug addiction. When Trump was running for president in 2016, Vance harshly criticized the candidate, privately worrying he could be an American Hitler. But Vance has embraced Trumpism with a convert’s zeal, and the similarities between the two men at the top of the ticket now outweigh the differences.
Vance will not necessarily assist Trump electorally; he may appeal to white, blue-collar workers, but as conservative writer Jonah Goldberg noted to NPR, “The people who love Vance most are already in love with Trump.” Instead, his selection is an ideological marker akin to Bill Clinton tapping fellow young Southerner Al Gore in 1992 as a way of reinforcing his “New Democrat” message.
“A J.D. Vance nomination is not about picking up voters,” Republican commentator Erick Erickson wrote on X on Monday. “It is about securing legacy. He gives intellectual voice to MAGA.”
Perhaps most significant is Vance’s steadfastness as an election denier, falsely insisting that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump. The former president needed a new running mate because his first vice president, Mike Pence, refused to attempt to overturn the election on January 6, 2021, irrevocably damaging his relationship with Trump. Vance has suggested that he would not have certified President Joe Biden’s election, unlike Pence, who was the target of chants to “hang Mike Pence” by the rioters who besieged the U.S. Capitol in a deadly attack on January 6.
“If I had been vice president, 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,” Vance said in February. The alternate slates of electors in several states have been the subject of criminal investigations, in some instances with charges filed, for their efforts to overturn the election. Trump prizes allies who will fight for him—he unsuccessfully implored Pence to “do the right thing” on January 6—and in Vance, he appears to have chosen an appropriate avatar.
“I think he likes [that] J.D. Vance does a good and passionate job of defending Donald Trump, which is what Donald Trump is looking for in a vice president,” said Donovan.
Vance has also advocated in favor of Trump transforming American bureaucracy. “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,” Vance told Vanity Fair in 2022, then quoted Andrew Jackson to justify the adoption of almost dictatorial powers. “And when the courts stop you stand before the country, and say—the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.” (This is in keeping with what Trump himself has suggested, that he would act as a dictator on “day one” to accomplish his goals.)
And Vance is not simply willing to defend Trump but also to go on the offensive against Democrats. After Trump was shot at a rally on Saturday, Vance blamed the Biden campaign for “rhetoric” that “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” (The motivation of the shooter is still unknown.)
The transformation of the party into one owned by Trump—and now Vance—was apparent at the convention on Monday, where delegates rained boos down upon Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Although McConnell is largely responsible for some of Trump’s greatest victories while in office—namely, the confirmation of three conservative Supreme Court justices while Republicans were in the majority—he was critical of the former president in the wake of the January 6 riot at the Capitol.
McConnell said on Monday that he believes Vance is a “great choice” for vice president, even as they are diametrically opposed on key issues, namely aid to Ukraine. The longtime Senate Republican leader has been one of Ukraine’s staunchest advocates in Congress, while Vance has generally opposed offering assistance, contending that McConnell is “far more obsessed with securing Ukraine’s border than he is focused on the American border.”
Vance’s break with the Republican Party of yore—that is, just over a decade ago—is also evident in the opinion of Senator Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee. “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance,” Romney told biographer McKay Coppins, noting Vance’s sharp turn toward far-right rhetoric once he was running for office in 2021.
“It’s not like you’re going to be famous and powerful because you became a United States senator,” Romney continued. “It’s like, really? You sell yourself so cheap?” (Being a heartbeat away from the presidency would grant the sort of fame and power that merely serving in the Senate may lack.)
Vance does have a more populist streak than other Senate Republicans, teaming up with Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren on bills cracking down on bank executives, and legislation with his fellow senator from Ohio—Democrat Sherrod Brown—strengthening railroad regulations in the wake of the train derailment in their state last year. However, Democrats have met Vance’s “pro-worker” stance with skepticism, pointing out that he opposes the PRO Act, a bill to support unions endorsed by labor interests.
“I did run into a problem of old guard Republicans who really hate the unions and really think of themselves fundamentally as advocates of the business community and not advocates of the voters that we represent,” Vance told Politico about his efforts to get other GOP senators signed onto his bipartisan rail safety legislation. “I think there are some Republicans who think that our base cares a lot about protecting bank CEOs who ran their banks into the ground. They don’t give a shit about that.”
But while he breaks with Republican conventional wisdom in some respects, Vance’s ideology is very much in line with modern GOP priorities. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, told reporters on Monday that “privately, we were really rooting for him.” The Heritage Foundation coordinated Project 2025, a blueprint for a future Republican presidency authored by former Trump officials and allies, which has become a recent target for Democrats.
Vance has echoed Trump’s rhetoric on other issues, such as immigration, pledging to build a wall at the southern border and “oppose every attempt to grant amnesty” to undocumented immigrants. He has occasionally taken a more explicitly hard-line stance on abortion than Trump, who has been skittish in calling for an overt federal ban even as his nominees to the Supreme Court ensured the conservative majority that overturned Roe v. Wade. In 2021, Vance compared abortion to slavery, and defended the lack of exceptions for incest and rape in a Texas abortion ban, saying that “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
However, Vance has more recently echoed Trump’s relatively standoffish comments on abortion, indicating that he would be open to exceptions to abortion bans and arguing that the issue should be left to the states. He has also argued in favor of policies that he believes would encourage a higher birth rate, such as making childbirth free. Still, he has voted against Democratic legislation in the Senate to codify access to contraception and to create protections for in vitro fertilization.
While his views on certain issues would have once been considered heterodox, Vance is now a symbol of the future of the GOP. He becomes the front-runner for the future leader of the party—not only in 2028 but potentially even before then, as Trump is 78 years old and Vance would be his immediate successor if they are elected.
“This might be the most consequential vice presidential pick ever,” Donovan said.
