Rust Belt roots, a rag-to-riches backstory and an ambition to be something of a philosopher politician have primed JD Vance to emerge as a natural face of the conservative populist movement. Former President Donald Trump selecting him as a running mate may further cement Vance’s rise as the heir-apparent to the movement.
That may be at the heart of why some Republicans wished Trump had picked someone else.
Praise from prominent Republican politicians including Speaker Mike Johnson and Sen. Lindsey Graham came the day Vance was announced. There has been a united front from the nation’s most vocal conservative politicians. But there has been division around Vance in the intellectual class — particularly for his economic stances and foreign policy philosophy.
It is part of a bigger debate in the party: should Republicans go the way of neoconservatism or embrace populism?
Dan McLaughlin, senior writer for National Review, said on social media that Vance was “the pick most calculated to divide Republicans.” McLaughlin, who has been firmly in the Never Trump camp, said most of his issues with Vance were not about Trump and instead were, “his isolationism, his lefty big-government economics, his cravenness on abortion & his taking sides with the Gaetz faction.”
Longtime columnist to The New York Times, Bret Stephens, wrote he thought Trump had made “a serious mistake” when choosing Vance, but said Vance had some strengths to consider like his age and ability to speak for people. “He speaks for millions of Americans who feel forgotten, disdained, condescended to or despised by the proverbial coastal elites.”
Those like David French who are not ideologically aligned with Trump pointed out Vance’s personal story offers something Trump may not have.
“He’s overcome a lot in his life, and when he highlights his story, a lot of working-class voters will identify his past and see themselves in him,” wrote French for The New York Times. “He’s got a much more relatable story than Trump, he’s younger than Trump, and he’s far more informed about policy than Trump.”
Though Vance has his critics, he also has his defenders — perhaps especially from those working to advance socially conservative ideas alongside economic populism.
Sohrab Ahmari reacted to Trump announcing Vance on social media, “We find ourselves dealing with a Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance, who says he welcomes sectoral bargaining — and who last year joined a picket line of striking auto workers in Ohio. This is undeniably good.” Ahmari wrote an article for The New Statesman saying the choice showed Trump was “determined to re-harness the populist and working-class energy that propelled his first campaign in 2016″ and Vance has shown he is the man for the job.
“Trump could have tapped a more conventional nominee to please the Republican party’s plutocratic and hawkish donor class — or even one of the plutocrats themselves, like the gazillionaire North Dakota governor Doug Burgum,” wrote Ahmari. “Instead, he settled on Vance, a figure who has already won the disdain of the keepers of Reaganite orthodoxy with his forays into domestic populism and emphasis on foreign policy restraint.”
Oren Cass, chief economist at American Compass, called Vance an “exceptional VP pick” in a social media post.
“Sen. Vance has really been at the forefront of providing a critique of what’s wrong with globalization, what’s wrong with financialization, what’s wrong with just chasing cheap labor and rising stock prices,” Cass told Semafor. “Just the fact of choosing Vance suggests that Trump doesn’t feel beholden to, or even loyal to Wall Street at this point.”
Vance has a reputation in certain circles, especially among the Compact and American Compass crowd, as a politician deeply engrossed in policymaking and articulating a forward-looking vision of the Republican Party.
As Batya Ungar-Sargon put it, “in all these ways, Vance is a standard-bearer for the new, Trumpian version of the GOP, the one that threw away the country club, Chamber of Commerce, free trade, and foreign wars party embodied by the likes of Mitch McConnell and Nikki Haley to embrace economic protectionism, tariffs, vastly limited immigration, and a commitment to American workers over elite consumers.”
His authorship of “Hillbilly Elegy” and his personal story may uniquely position him with Americans to take his assuming the reins of the conservative populist movement seriously.
JD Vance’s beliefs: What’s his vision for America?
Understanding Vance’s political worldview starts with “Hillbilly Elegy.” The book was published three years after he graduated from Yale Law School, but his story starts in Rust Belt America.
There, Vance’s grandparents raised him because his mother struggled with drug addiction. He grew up in a town devastated by the shuttering of factories, the fracture of families and largely devoid of hope for upward mobility. Though he almost failed out of high school, Vance’s journey took him to the Marines, then to Ohio State University and eventually to New Haven, where he became especially contemplative about his circumstances.
In Vance’s memoir, he weaves together moments of observation he had, like the safety net churches can provide, and the different cultures he saw in his childhood town compared to his Yale, and comes up with a thesis — public policy can help, but the solution to societal ills like poverty is not solely solved by government and the so-called elite class.
This thesis Vance advanced then is still one he espouses, but even more strongly. In an interview for First Things with Matthew Schmitz earlier this year, he echoed his elitism. “They’re actively scornful of the people who made me who I am. My family and my friends and my community are very, very aware of this. They are very aware of the fact that even their own representatives don’t actually like them very much.”
Vance did undergo a shift, as it pertains to his feelings about Trump. Though he was once a Trump critic who said he voted for Evan McMullin, he changed his mind. He apologized for the comments in a 2021 interview.
“Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016,” Vance told Fox News. “And 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. I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.”
So, what are Vance’s political beliefs?
Vance, in an interview with Ross Douthat of The New York Times, laid out his vision for a comprehensive populist economic agenda. He is supportive of American manufacturing.
“We’ve had far too little innovation over the last 40 years, and far too much labor substitution,” said Vance, explaining he believes the solution is to apply “as much upward pressure on wages and as much downward pressure on the services that people use as possible.” As for Social Security, Vance said he believes the money could come from activating more men into the workforce and then also getting the money from tariffs.
Vance told Douthat he does not like the idea of raising taxes on the middle class and thinks taxes would not solve the underlying issue.
The GOP vice presidential candidate also made headlines when he joined striking workers from United Auto Workers on the picket line. He was one of the only Republicans to do so and has been supportive of unions, but with some caveats. He told Politico he opposed the PRO Act, a pro-union reform bill, because he would rather the U.S. move toward a sectoral model where industries negotiate contracts. He is also skeptical of the politicization of unions.
“If your politics lead you to defend the baristas union as they defend Hamas, then you should have a different politics,” said Vance. “It’s really that simple.”
Due to his economic views, Vance has made some surprising bedfellows on certain issues, as Schmitz observed. He sponsored a bill alongside Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, on railroad safety, worked with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on legislature to limit bank executive compensation in times of failure and collaborated with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-N.Y., on a bill to eliminate the corporate-merger tax.
Vance was dubbed “the Senate’s MAGA dealmaker” by Semafor’s David Weigel for his willingness to work across the aisle.
As it pertains to aid to Ukraine, Vance wrote an op-ed in The New York Times saying Ukraine needs more soldiers than the country can give and more military equipment than the United States can provide. He said he remains “opposed to virtually any proposal for the United States to continue funding this war” because he does not believe the aid could viably help Ukraine win the war and he thinks America lacks the capacity to build the munitions necessary.
When it comes to aid for Israel, Vance led an effort to send money to only Israel rather than packaging it with aid for Ukraine. The New York Times reported Vance said he did this because he believes Israel could achieve its objective.
Vance has described himself as pro-life and has also said abortion should mostly be left to the states, but would be OK with federal legislation setting a minimum. “Ohio is going to want to have a different abortion policy from California, from New York, and I think that’s reasonable,” he told the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Beyond his political beliefs, Vance is unabashedly religious. He grew up Protestant, though he said in his memoir he did not always attend church. As an adult, he converted to Catholicism. Some see Vance as remaking the religious right into religious populism. Schmitz said if religious groups in America “want to exercise the duties of citizenship rather than withdrawing from politics altogether, will need to look to leaders like JD Vance.”
If the Trump-Vance ticket were to win in November and Vance proves his staying power, it could alter the dynamic of the Republican Party.
“In choosing Vance, Trump has officially signed off on the next generation of Republican leadership,” wrote Ungar-Sargon, “giving America a view of what the changing of the guard will look like in four years.”