JD Vance is Donald Trump’s running mate for the 2024 Presidential election and has made a name for himself as a combative surrogate for the former Commander-in-Chief’s vision for a second term.
The US Presidential election is now less than a week away, and Vance has been hitting the swing states to campaign for the Republican Party in the hopes of being the Vice President come January.
Vance’s rise from an impoverished background in Appalachia to the precipice of power has been remarkable, but he’s picked up his share of critics along the way, particularly for his infamous “childless cat-ladies” jibe towards the Democrats, and hardline stance on abortion.
Here’s all you need to know about Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance.
James David Vance is an author, marine veteran, and former venture capitalist who has served as a senator for Ohio since 2023.
His selection as Trump’s running mate was met with bemusement among Democrats and political watchers, who remembered Vance’s vociferous condemnations of the former President, and his previous declaration of being a “never Trump guy”.
But since making the comments back in 2016, the Ohio senator has been on something of a “journey” ideologically and has increasingly aligned himself with the values of Trump’s MAGA-fied GOP, as the real estate mogul cemented his grip on the party.
Vance has since become a full-throated Trump surrogate, and has even joined the former star of The Apprentice in pouring doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election which the former President lost to Joe Biden.
Vance signalled in 2022 that he would back a nationwide restriction on abortion beyond 15 weeks of pregnancy, and has previously voiced support for a national ban – though he now denies this.
In recent times, the Vice Presidential hopeful has changed his stance to be more in line with Trump, who appears to have been spooked by stumbles in the 2022 midterm elections driven by the reversal of Roe v Wade, and has since been more oblique on the issue.
On Ukraine, Vance is among the leading Republican voices arguing against the US providing military aid to Kyiv, writing in an op-ed in April that he “remains opposed to virtually any proposal for the United States to continue funding this war,” NPR reports.
He has also encouraged Biden to push for a negotiated peace with Vladimir Putin.
Vance has lamented the “crisis” at the southern border and has echoed Trump’s accusations that Biden and Harris have failed with their immigration policy.
In his debate with Kamala Harris’ running mate Tim Walz on October 1, Vance said the Trump administration would focus its threatened mass deportation efforts on undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes. He said others would be pushed to leave the country through new rules on wages, as per Axios.
But critics have noted that despite Vance’s vociferous criticism of Biden’s record on the border, he was among the Republicans pressured by Trump into killing a bipartisan bill that would tighten border controls.
The legislation would provide the president with the authority to shut down the asylum system if border crossing exceeded a monthly threshold, and add more than 1,500 new Customs and Border Protection personnel – among other measures.
During his debate with Walz, Vance also said he didn’t believe Trump lost the 2020 election, despite there being no evidence to support the ex-President’s claim that widespread voter fraud led to a stolen vote.
Earlier in the campaign, a clip emerged of Vance saying in a 2021 interview with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the country was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and “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.”
It prompted outrage among Democrats, sparking accusations of sexism. Vance doubled down on this remark, telling SiriusXM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show”: “Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats”.
He then lamented the media “focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said.”
Born in Middletown, Ohio, Vance enlisted as a combat correspondent, or military journalist after leaving high school, serving from 2003 to 2007.
From late 2005, he was deployed on a six-month tour in Iraq, earning a Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal and a Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal during his time in the armed forces.
He then studied political science and philosophy at Ohio State University before earning a degree from Yale Law School, after which he briefly worked for a law firm.
But though Vance has made his home among wealthy figures on the American Right, his early life was unlike many of his colleagues in the Senate, having come from a poor background in Appalachia, a region devastated by the opioid crisis.
He detailed his experience of being brought up by a mother as she wrestled with drug addiction in Appalachia in his critically acclaimed memoir Hillbilly Elegy (2016), which was turned into a Netflix film and brought him to widespread prominence.
During his time in Venture Capital investing, Vance was taken under the wing of billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who later plowed $15million into his Senate campaign.
