MILWAUKEE − JD Vance, introducing himself to the American people for the first time Wednesday night, wanted to make this much clear: He’s not a pol.
He is the survivor of a childhood marked by violence and his mother’s drug addiction. He is a Marine veteran, a husband and father, an entrepreneur, an author whose Hillbilly Elegy told the story of the decline of his grandparents’ Appalachia with such pathos that it became a national bestseller and a Netflix movie.
“Some people tell me I’ve lived the American Dream, and, of course, they’re right,” the Ohio senator said. “But the American Dream that always counted most was not starting a business or becoming a senator or even being here with you fine people, although it’s pretty awesome. It was becoming a good husband and a good dad, and of giving my family the things I never had as a kid.
“And that’s the accomplishment I’m proudest of.”
Pol or not, though, James David Vance has scored one of the fastest rises in modern American politics of anyone not named Trump.
In 2022, in his first bid for public office, Vance prevailed in a crowded Republican primary, then won a contested Senate race. Eighteen months later, he was on stage at the Fiserv Forum here, being cheered by thousands of conventioneers as he accepted Trump’s offer to join his ticket.
If elected, he would be the youngest vice president since the Civil War.
Win or lose, he now has the Trump stamp of approval as an heir to the MAGA movement that has redefined the Republican Party and roiled American politics.
Rugged good looks and Rust Belt appeal
He is, as Trump likes to say, a vice president out of central casting, tall and athletic, wearing a dark suit and navy tie.
What presumably appealed to Trump even more was Vance’s potential appeal to working-class voters in the Rust Belt. Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were famously dubbed the “Blue Wall” because their reliable support gave Democratic presidential contenders an edge in the Electoral College.
When Trump carried all three states in 2016, he won the White House. When Democrat Joe Biden flipped all three back in 2020, Trump lost his bid for reelection. This time, winning back that trio of states is clearly Vance’s Job One.
Besides his home states of Ohio and Kentucky, they were the only other states he mentioned by name.
Vance cited the economic travails of “the auto worker in Michigan,” “the factory worker in Wisconsin” and the “energy worker in Pennsylvania and Ohio, who doesn’t understand why Joe Biden is willing to buy energy from tinpot dictators across the world when he could buy it from his own citizens right here in this country.”
He blamed trade deals with Mexico and China with costing the United States good-paying manufacturing jobs − deals he noted Biden supported as a senator. He criticized the “disastrous” war in Iraq. (The commander-in-chief then was a Republican, George W. Bush, but Vance’s point was that Biden had supported it as a senator.)
“I grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands, and loved their God, family, community, and country with their whole hearts,” he said. “But it was also a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington.”
The first joint rally with Trump and Vance is set for Saturday.
In Grand Rapids, Michigan.
JD Vance who?
Most Americans, 60% of them, said they didn’t know enough about Vance to have an opinion of him, good or bad.
His favorable rating in an AP/NORC Poll taken just before he was picked was just 22%, but his unfavorable rating was even lower, at 17%.
That made the first glimpse most voters have of him particularly important because in politics, as in life, you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.
The history of relatively obscure running mates has sometimes been problematic. In 1984, Democrat Rep. Geraldine Ferraro became enmeshed in controversy over her husband’s finances. In 1988, Republican Sen. Dan Quayle never entirely overcame the image of a lightweight set with his bouncing entrance when his name was announced.
No surprise, then that Democrats immediately began to try to brand Vance in negative ways. “A rubber stamp” for Trump’s “extreme agenda,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a campaign video.
“Just another MAGA Republican in the pocket of special interests,” a Democratic National Committee news release said.
Democrats have spotlighted Vance’s support for a national ban on abortion and his opposition to aid for Ukraine in its war with Russia.
On Wednesday night, Republicans were naturally trying to define him in positive ways, leaving abortion and Ukraine unmentioned. Vance also didn’t mention his early criticism of Trump, when he had called him “a total fraud,” before he became an avid convert to the former president and his agenda.
He did show occasional flashes of humor, telling an anecdote about his blunt-spoken grandmother − “She could make a sailor blush,” he said − that prompted the crowd to chant “Grandma! Grandma!”
When he introduced his mother, “10 years clean and sober,” seated in the box that included Trump, the crowd chanted “JD’s mom! JD’s mom!”
When he strode on stage, introduced by his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, the band played the country-music classic “America First” by Merle Haggard.
When he finished, joined by a clutch of family members on stage, the band played “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” − a song that just happened to be the signature of a Democratic president, Bill Clinton.
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