In April, former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for President, chose the Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate.
Vance, a lawyer and venture capitalist whose election to the Senate two years ago was his first foray into public service, rose to fame with the publication of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy in 2016. In it, he describes growing up in Middletown, Ohio, a steel town suffering the ravages of deindustrialization.
Vance has traded on his book, and his working-class background, to position himself as a “working man” who hates “elites” — and to win votes from working people who, like the residents of Middletown, have been the victims of decades of corporate globalization. However, his actual life tells a different story.
As Fortune magazine reported in July, “J.D. Vance’s public Venmo account highlights ties to group behind Project 2025—as well as alumni of ‘elite universities’ the nominee has condemned.” (Project 2025 is a comprehensive wishlist for expanding corporate power under a Trump-Vance administration, put together by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.) Vance attended Yale University Law School — one of the most elite of all elite universities — and has maintained ties with his classmates there, hardly the behavior of one who “views members of the elite with an almost primal scorn,” as he wrote in Hillbilly Elegy.
In San Francisco, where he moved to pursue a career as a venture capitalist, Vance was mentored by the right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel. (Thiel donated an estimated $15 million to Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign.) According to an analysis by the investigative news outlet The Lever in 2022, Vance has “structured his income to exploit a controversial tax loophole that almost exclusively benefits the super-rich.”
Vance moved back to Ohio in 2016 and set up a non-profit called “Our Ohio Renewal” to “enhance economic opportunities” in places like Middleton, but it has little record of achievement, and was widely seen as simply a front for his political ambitions. “There were so many people who had hope in [Vance] in 2016, 2017,” Matt Hildreth, executive director of the grassroots group Rural Organizing, who is based in Ohio, told The Guardian. “He was being credited as the guy who knew what these communities needed. He’s friends with billionaires. He could have brought billions of dollars into Ohio if he wanted to. He didn’t.”
Since being elected to the Senate, Vance has mostly used his position to pursue culture-war efforts, joining with far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on a bill to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors and pressuring federal regulators to kill a privacy rule that prevents police from accessing the medical records of people seeking reproductive health care. Meanwhile, he has been an enthusiastic supporter of Big Oil and Big Tech.
Ultimately, however much Vance positions himself as someone who will fight for “the working man,” he has no program to bring the jobs, education and healthcare that would benefit working people in his home town of Middletown or anywhere else in the country, offering only divisive rhetoric in its place.