JD Vance
James David Vance is an American politician and author serving as the 50th vice president of the United States. A member of the Republican Party, he represented Ohio in the United States Senate from 2023 to 2025.
Born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, Vance enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 2003, serving as a military journalist in public affairs throughout his four-year tenure until 2007. He earned a bachelor's degree from Ohio State University and a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School. After a brief career in corporate law, Vance worked for Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Mithril Capital.
Vance gained national prominence with his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, amid scholarly and media efforts to interpret white working-class disaffection after Donald Trump's election and the political realignment in post-industrial Appalachia and the Midwest. Vance was originally concerned by and opposed Trump's candidacy, but later became a strong supporter during Trump's presidency. He was elected to the Senate in 2022, defeating Democratic nominee Tim Ryan in the general election after winning a crowded Republican primary with Trump's endorsement.
Vance was selected as Trump's running mate in the 2024 presidential election and resigned from the Senate before his inauguration as vice president. During his tenure as vice president, he has also served as finance chair of the Republican National Committee. He has been described as a national conservative and right-wing populist, aligning himself with the "postliberal" New Right movement. His political platform is characterized by opposition to immigration, abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control, and U.S. support for Ukraine, and he is an outspoken critic of childlessness. He has cited Catholic social teaching and Catholic theology as influences on his views, some of which have been criticized by both Pope Francis and his successor, Pope Leo XIV, as misrepresenting Church teaching.
Early life, military service, and education
Vance was born James Donald Bowman on August 2, 1984, in Middletown, Ohio, where he was also raised. His mother is Beverly Carol Aikins, and his father was Donald Ray Bowman; they divorced when he was a toddler. Vance wrote in his book Hillbilly Elegy that he was of Scots-Irish descent, and research has traced his family's lineage to the village of Coagh in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He grew up in an Appalachian American culture, spending summers with relatives in Jackson, Kentucky.After he was adopted by his mother's third husband, Bob Hamel, his mother changed his name to James David Hamel to remove his biological father's first name and surname and to use an uncle's first name, David. Vance therefore kept his first name and his nickname, JD. His surname eventually changed to her maiden name after her parents became his caretakers.
Vance has written that his childhood was marked by poverty and abuse, and that his mother struggled with drug addiction. He and his elder sister, Lindsay, were raised primarily by their maternal grandparents, James and Bonnie Vance, whom they called "Papaw" and "Mamaw".
After graduating from Middletown High School in 2003, Vance enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, serving as a combat correspondent with the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. During his four years of service, he was deployed to Iraq in 2005 for six months in a non-combat role, writing articles and taking photographs. In December 2005, he was part of a group of Marines that held a roundtable discussion with Vice President Dick Cheney. He attained the rank of corporal, and his decorations included the Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal and the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal.
In 2007, Vance left the military and used the G.I. Bill to study at Ohio State University. He graduated in 2009 with a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude in political science and philosophy. In 2010, Vance entered Yale Law School, where he won a staff position on The Yale Law Journal and worked with a group of its editors who primarily checked citations. At Yale, he befriended fellow Ohio native and future Republican politician Vivek Ramaswamy. During his first year, Professor Amy Chua persuaded Vance to begin writing his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
Vance also initiated a rapport with Peter Thiel after attending his 2011 talk at Yale. In 2010–2011, Vance wrote for David Frum's "FrumForum" website under the name J. D. Hamel. Although Hillbilly Elegy states that he adopted his grandparents' surname of Vance upon his marriage in 2014, the name change actually occurred in April 2013, as he was about to graduate from Yale. Vance obtained his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in May 2013 and was admitted to the bar in Kentucky later that year.
Early career
After graduating from law school, Vance worked for Republican senator John Cornyn. He spent a year as a law clerk for Judge David Bunning of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, then worked at the law firm Sidley Austin, beginning a brief career as a corporate lawyer. Having practiced law for slightly under two years, Vance moved to San Francisco to work in the technology industry as a venture capitalist. Between 2016 and 2017, he was a principal at Peter Thiel's firm, Mithril Capital.In June 2016, Harper published Vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. The memoir recounts the Appalachian culture and socioeconomic problems of Vance's upbringing. Hillbilly Elegy was on The New York Times Best Seller list in 2016 and 2017. The Times listed it among "6 Books to Help Understand Trump's Win", and Vance was profiled in The Washington Post, which called him "the voice of the Rust Belt". In The New Republic, Sarah Jones criticized Vance as "liberal media's favorite white trash–splainer" and a "false prophet of blue America", calling the book "little more than a list of myths about welfare queens". Hillbilly Elegys success helped propel Vance into contact with social elites, and he began writing a column for The New York Times. Vance later said that his interactions with social elites from this time, particularly their perceived disdain for "the people he grew up with", helped shape his later views.
Vance worked at a biotech company named Circuit Therapeutics from 2015 to 2017. Its chairman, Frederic Moll, said he hired Vance for his intelligence, legal qualifications, and connection to Thiel. Vance tried to get Mithril Capital to invest in Circuit but Mithril passed. Colin Greenspon, then managing director at Mithril, liked Vance and got him to move to Mithril in 2016. At Mithril, Vance clashed with Mithril's co-founder and managing director Ajay Royan. He decided to leave in 2017. Bloomberg reports he deleted all traces of Mithril from his LinkedIn profile. Vance moved back to Ohio, where he published an op-ed in The New York Times with the headline "Why I'm moving home", in which he complained about "highly educated transplants" in Silicon Valley. In another interview, he said elite tech crowds wielded "political-financial power in combination with a certain condescension". In 2017, Vance joined Revolution LLC, an investment firm founded by Steve Case. Greenspon left Mithril and joined Vance at Revolution in 2018. At Revolution Vance was tasked with expanding the "Rise of the Rest" initiative, which focuses on growing investments in underserved regions outside Silicon Valley and New York City.
Vance was a CNN contributor in 2017 and 2018.
In 2017, Vance sold the film rights to Hillbilly Elegy to Imagine Entertainment. In April 2017, Ron Howard signed on to direct the film version, which was released in select theaters on November 11, 2020, and later that month on Netflix.
In 2019, Vance was on the board of advisors of the With Honor Fund, a Super PAC that helps veterans run for office. From 2020 to 2023, he was on the board of advisors of American Moment, a networking and training organization for young conservatives that is affiliated with Project 2025.
In 2019, Vance and Chris Buskirk co-founded the conservative political advocacy group Rockbridge Network. That year, he also co-founded venture capital firm Narya Capital in Cincinnati with financial backing from Thiel, Eric Schmidt, and Marc Andreessen. In 2020, he raised $93 million for the firm. With Thiel and former Trump adviser Darren Blanton, Vance invested in Rumble, a Canadian online video platform popular with the political right.
Our Ohio Renewal
In December 2016, Vance said he planned to move to Ohio and would consider starting a nonprofit or running for office. In Ohio, he started Our Ohio Renewal, a 501 advocacy organization focused on education, addiction, and other "social ills" he had mentioned in his memoir. According to a 2017 archived capture of the nonprofit's website, the advisory board members were Keith Humphreys, Jamil Jivani, Yuval Levin, and Sally Satel. According to a 2020 capture of the website, those four remained in those positions throughout the organization's existence. Our Ohio Renewal closed by 2021 with sparse achievements. According to Jivani, the organization's director of law and policy, its work was derailed by Jivani's cancer diagnosis. It raised around $221,000 in 2017 and spent most of its revenue on overhead costs and travel. In subsequent years, it raised less than $50,000.During Vance's 2022 U.S. Senate campaign, Tim Ryan, the Democratic nominee, said the charity was a front for Vance's political ambitions. Ryan pointed to reports that the organization paid a Vance political adviser and conducted public opinion polling, while its efforts to address addiction failed. Vance denied the characterization. Our Ohio Renewal's tax filings show that in its first year, it spent more on "management services" provided by its executive director Jai Chabria, who became Vance's chief campaign strategist, than it did on programs to fight opioid abuse. In 2017, Vance formed a similarly named 501 organization, Our Ohio Renewal Foundation, which raised around $69,000 from 2017 to 2023. As of September 2024, the foundation had not spent any funds since 2019.
According to the Associated Press and a 2019 ProPublica investigation, the charity's biggest accomplishment, sending psychiatrist Sally Satel to Ohio's Appalachian region for a yearlong residency in 2018, was "tainted" by the ties among Satel, her employer, American Enterprise Institute, and Purdue Pharma, in the form of knowledge exchange between Satel and Purdue and financial support from Purdue to AEI. Satel denied having any relationship with Purdue or any knowledge of its donations to AEI.