The Making of the President 2024: The Selection of J.D. Vance
On July 15, 2024, the first day of the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump announced that he had chosen Senator James David Vance of Ohio (better known as J.D. Vance) as his running mate. He made the announcement in a post on the social media platform known as "Truth Social."
Vance, who was born on August 2, 1984, is a US Marine veteran who has served as the junior United States Senator from Ohio since 2023. Vance joined the Marines after completing high school, and served in the Corp from 2003 to 2007. He graduated from Ohio State University in 2009 and from Yale Law School in 2013. He published his memoir in 2016, entitled Hillbilly Elegy. It was made into a movie in 2020. The memoir is about Vance's upbringing in the Appalachian region of Ohio and describes socioeconomic problems of Vance's small-town upbringing. Hillbilly Elegy was on the New York Times Best Seller lists in 2016 and 2017.
In 2022, Vance won the election to the US Senate in Ohio, defeating Democrat Tim Ryan. Six years earlier, Vance had opposed Donald Trump's candidacy in the 2016 Presidential election, going so far as to publicly call Trump an "idiot" and said that Trump was "reprehensible." Privately, he compared him to Adolf Hitler. That year he wrote to an associate on Facebook, "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler."
By the time Vance ran for Senate in 2022, his views on Trump had changed. He downplayed the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump's supporters, and he was able to win the former president's coveted endorsement in his campaign for the senate. Trump's support helped put him over the top in a competitive primary.
In media interviews, Vance defended his about face in his views on Trump, stating that he gradually realized that his opposition to the former president was rooted in style rather than substance. He said that he agreed with Trump's contentions that free trade had hollowed out middle America by crushing domestic manufacturing and that the nation's leaders were too quick to get involved in foreign wars.
On January 31, 2023, Vance endorsed Trump in the 2024 Republican Presidential primaries. Vance was on a short list of possible running mates for Trump and on July 15, 2024, the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Trump announced that he had chosen Vance as his running mate. The announcement was made in a post on the Truth Social media platform. On July 17, the third day of the convention, Vance accepted the nomination to be Trump's running mate.
It has been reported that Trump's two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump both advocated for their father to choose Vance. Vance was also said to be the choice recommended by Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson and also by the leaders of the Heritage Foundation, the drafters of the controversial "Project 2025."
Earlier, on May 15, 2024, Trump had attended a $50,000 per head private fundraising dinner with Vance in Cincinnati. Vance appeared at a number of significant conservative political events and in June was described as a potential running mate for Trump.
In late July 2024, after President Joe Biden withdrew his name from nomination as his party's presidential candidate for re-election, it soon became apparent that Vice President Kamala Harris would be the Democratic Party's standard bearer. Vance said at a private fundraiser that the "bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden. Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did." The next day, Vance told the media: "I don't think the political calculus changes at all" whether Harris or Biden is the Democratic nominee.
Vance has been criticized for his past remarks and political positions. He said in an August 2024 interview that a vice president "doesn't really matter" and that "Kamala Harris has been a bad vice president". Trump himself has said that the "vice president, in terms of the election, does not have any impact".
Shortly after being named Trump's running mate, Vance was criticized for a remark he made in a 2021 Fox News interview, in which he said, "we are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by 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." This comment resurfaced and sparked immediate backlash across news and social media. On July 26, 2024, Vance clarified his remarks on the Megyn Kelly Show, stating, "It's not a criticism of people who don't have children" and "this is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child".
More comments that Vance made in interviews in which he was critical of women and people who were not parents resurfaced. In a 2020 podcast interview, he said that being childless "makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less, less mentally stable". In a 2021 speech, Vance said that childless teachers were "trying to brainwash the minds of our children." He criticized American Federation of Teachers President Randy Weingarten, saying, "If she wants to brainwash and destroy the mind of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone." Vance also suggested in a March 2021 interview that childless people should be taxed at a higher rate than those with children, adding that the U.S. should "reward the things that we think are good" and "punish the things that we think are bad". In an August 2024 interview, Vance said he supported increasing the child tax credit from $2,000 per child up to $5,000 per child, despite the fact that his Senate Republican colleagues had blocked an expanded child tax credit in the Senate two weeks earlier.
In late August, after the Trump campaign was embroiled in controversy for allegedly bringing cameras into a restricted area of Arlington National Cemetery, during Trump's visit there, Vance first said that Harris "can go to hell" because "she wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up", and then said "Don't do this fake outrage thing."
An August 2024 poll by Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research noted that roughly 3 in 10 U.S. adults don't know enough about Vance, with 27% having a favorable opinion of him, compared to 36% for Democratic Vice-Presidential Nominee Tim Walz. Vance's less than stellar public reception and other concerns led some prominent Republican politicians and political scientists to say that he may have been a poor choice of running mate.
Vance is considered to be a social conservative. He opposes abortion, same-sex marriage, and has called for parents to have more voting power than non-parents. He has also called on his running mate for "fire every civil servant and replace them with our people." He has also said that if he had been Vice-President in 2020, he would not have certified the election results.