Former President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he would select Ohio Republican Senator JD Vance as the 2024 vice presidential nominee for the Republican Party.
Trump wrote in a social media post that he ultimately believes Vance will be “best suited to assume the position,” passing over other potential running mates such as North Dakota Republican Governor Doug Burgum and Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio. Trump and Vance appeared together on Monday at the first day of the Republican National Convention.
Vance, who is thirty-nine years old and the first millennial to be designated as a vice presidential nominee, served in the Marine Corps before attending Ohio State University and Yale Law School. He rose to prominence with a book entitled Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir that detailed the economic and social difficulties faced by his hometown in Ohio, which was later adapted to film.
Vance has also worked in Silicon Valley, serving as a principal at a firm founded by entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel, who was a significant donor to Vance as he successfully won a Senate seat in the 2022 midterms. Many have speculated that Vance will seek to improve persistent human capital problems for the Republican Party, which has typically lacked credentialed staffers such that their capacity to govern is limited.
Throughout his brief tenure in the Senate, Vance has advocated for a populist economic policy that involves reducing the deficit, lowering taxes for the middle class but not necessarily the wealthy, and maintaining current levels of entitlement spending and Social Security.
Vance, who converted to Roman Catholicism in 2019, has repeatedly emphasized the dangers of American demographic decline and backed policies meant to encourage increased childbearing. Yet he publicly voiced support for access to mifepristone, one of two drugs used in the abortion pill regiment by which two-thirds of abortions in the United States occur, shortly after Trump said in the first presidential debate that he would support access to the substance.
