J. D. Vance Biography

J.D. Vance wrote the memoir Hillbilly Elegy, a 2016 bestseller that made him a celebrity expert on the troubles of poor white Americans, and ultimately led to his selection to the Republican party presidential ticket of 2024.

James David Vance grew up outside of Cincinnati, Ohio and in Kentucky with his grandparents. (His parents split up when Vance was a youngster; he was later adopted by his mother’s third husband and took his last name.) Hillbilly Elegy depicts Vance’s life as a poor outsider — with no father and a drug-addicted mother — who was given strength by his disciplinarian grandmother. Vance joined the Marines and was a public affairs officer (2003-07), then earned degrees from Ohio State University (2007-10) and Yale Law School (2010-13).

He met controversial celebrity professor Amy Chua there, and she was enchanted enough to help Vance get his memoir published and promoted on national television. Meanwhile, Vance went to work as a venture capitalist in San Francisco with wealthy right-wing powerbroker Peter Thiel.

Hillbilly Elegy was fortuitously published at a time when the American press was trying to explain the “populist” appeal of Donald Trump, and Vance’s anecdotal analysis seemed to fit the bill. Vance’s popularity on TV as the voice of rural whites allowed him to quit his job as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley and move to Ohio, where he became a venture capitalist and a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2022.

Despite being a Yale Law graduate and money man for high tech executives, Vance ran for office claiming Americans need to fight the “east coast elites” and high tech executives. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, helped along by donations from conservative donors including Thiel, who gave $10 million to a pro-Vance PAC.

To woo Trump supporters in Ohio, Vance famously repudiated his harsh criticisms of Donald Trump from 2016 and 2017.  (He had written to a friend in 2016, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical [expletive] like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”)  He was rewarded for his reversal in 2024, when Donald Trump named him to be his vice-presidential candidate on the Republican ticket.