JD Vance

Vance was born James Donald Bowman on August 2, 1984, in Middletown, Ohio, the city in which he was also raised. His mother is Beverly Carol Aikins (née Vance), and his father was Donald Ray Bowman (1959–2023); they divorced when he was a toddler. Vance wrote in his book Hillbilly Elegy that he was of Scots-Irish descent. He grew up in an Appalachian American culture, spending summers with relatives in Jackson, Kentucky.

Vance attended Roosevelt Elementary School and Vail Middle School, which were demolished in 2008 and 2012, respectively. He briefly attended West Elkton Elementary School for fourth grade. Vance has written that his childhood was marked by poverty and abuse, and that his mother struggled with drug addiction. She worked as a registered nurse when Vance was a toddler, where she reportedly got addicted to pharmaceutical drugs after one of her co-workers offered her Vicodin for a headache. Soon thereafter, she was fired and lost her nursing license after she got caught stealing morphine. He and his elder sister, Lindsay, were raised primarily by their maternal grandparents, James Lee Vance (1929–1997) and Bonnie Eloise Blanton (1933–2005), whom they called "Papaw" and "Mamaw". In 1990, 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. He eventually changed his surname to his mother's maiden name, Vance, in April 2013.

Vance attended Middletown High School from 1999 until he graduated in 2003 with an honors diploma. In 2007, he began studying at Ohio State University, where he graduated with highest honors in 2009 with a Bachelor of Arts 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. Vance's future wife was the journal's executive developmental editor. 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. …

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 Elegy's 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 early 2018, Vance considered running for the U.S. Senate against Sherrod Brown, but did not. In March 2021, Peter Thiel gave $10 million to Protect Ohio Values, a super PAC created in February to support a potential Vance candidacy. Robert Mercer also gave an undisclosed amount. In April, Vance expressed interest in running for the Senate seat being vacated by Rob Portman. In May, he launched an exploratory committee.

Vance announced his Senate campaign in Ohio on July 1, 2021. On May 3, 2022, he won the Republican primary with 32% of the vote, defeating multiple candidates, including Josh Mandel (24%) and Matt Dolan (23%). On November 8, in the general election, Vance defeated Democratic nominee Tim Ryan with 53% of the vote to Ryan's 47%. This vote share was considered a vast underperformance compared to other Ohio Republicans, especially in the coinciding gubernatorial election. Vance had often previously spelled his name with periods after his initials ("J.D.")—including in the publication of Hillbilly Elegy—but after becoming a candidate for office, he removed the periods ("JD").

On January 3, 2023, Vance was sworn into the Senate as a member of the 118th United States Congress. Vance was Ohio's junior senator from January 3, 2023, to January 3, 2025. Data from mid-July 2024 showed that Vance had made 45 Senate speeches and sponsored 57 legislative bills, none of which had passed the Senate. Vance had also co-sponsored 288 bills, of which two passed both the Senate and the House but were vetoed by Biden. He attended Biden's 2023 State of the Union Address.

On March 1, 2023, Vance and Senator Sherrod Brown co-sponsored bipartisan legislation to prevent derailments like the one in East Palestine, but the bill failed due to lack of intra-caucus Republican support. In June 2023, Vance voted against raising the debt ceiling, standing against final passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 and saying it would result in "a reduced military in the face of a rising threat from China".

In July 2023, Vance and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced legislation that would have made gender-affirming care for minors a federal crime, with penalties of up to 12 years in prison. …

At noon on January 20, 2025, Vance became the 50th vice president of the United States, sworn into the office by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Before his inauguration, he held a meeting with China's vice president Han Zheng in which they discussed China–United States relations. Vance is also the first Marine Corps veteran to serve as vice president.

Among Vance's first acts as vice president was swearing in Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the first of Trump's cabinet nominees to be approved by the Senate, on January 21. On January 24, he cast the tie-breaking vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. In February 2025, after multiple federal judges issued temporary rulings against various Trump administration actions, Vance wrote, "judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power".

On February 14, 2025, Vance delivered a speech at the 61st Munich Security Conference. In it, he criticized European Union leaders for actions such as annulling Romania's presidential election under claims of foreign interference and using "misinformation" laws to silence political opposition. Vance warned that the US would condition its support for Europe on whether its governments actually uphold free speech, press freedom, and political legitimacy, and criticized European governments for "running in fear of their own voters". His tone and content marked a sharp departure from past US foreign policy rhetoric and prompted strong backlash from European leaders. Several media outlets regarded the speech as a turning point in European Union–United States relations along with Trump's telephone conversation with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Some called it a declaration of "ideological war" and "culture war" against the United States' European allies, and a "wrecking ball" to the decades-long status quo of transatlantic relations.

In a first for a sitting U.S. vice president, in March 2025 Vance visited Greenland, where he said "We can't just ignore the president's desires" for the U.S. to acquire Greenland. He also warned that Greenland faced the "encroachment of powerful countries" China and Russia "as they expand their ambitions", while declaring in a "message to Denmark" that "you have not done a good job". Vance criticized Denmark for having "underinvested in the security architecture" and "people of Greenland". …

Vance wrote in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, that he was raised in a low-income family by his single mother and grandmother. In 2013, Vance met Usha Chilukuri while both were students at Yale Law School. In June 2014, they married in Kentucky in an interfaith marriage ceremony; she is Hindu and he was a Protestant Christian. In 2019, he converted to Roman Catholicism. The wedding included a Bible reading by Vance's "best friend", Jamil Jivani, and the bride and groom were blessed by a Hindu pandit. Usha clerked for a year for Brett Kavanaugh, at the time an appeals court judge in Washington, then clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts for a year.

JD and Usha Vance have four children. With the birth of the couple's fourth child on July 19, 2026, Vance became the first vice president to have a child while in office since Schuyler Colfax in 1870. In an excerpt from his book Communion published in June 2026 as an op-ed by The Wall Street Journal, Vance wrote that the 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk influenced Usha's decision to have a fourth child. The couple own over 100 acres of land in Kentucky. In 2018, Vance bought a 157-year-old home for $1.4 million in East Walnut Hills, Cincinnati.

Vance was raised in a "conservative, evangelical" branch of Protestantism. When entering college, he was an atheist. By September 2016, he was "not an active participant" in any particular Christian denomination but was "thinking very seriously about converting to Catholicism". In August 2019, Vance was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church. He chose Augustine of Hippo as his confirmation saint. Vance said he converted because he "became persuaded over time that Catholicism was true [...] and Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way", adding that Catholic theology aligned with his political views and key people in his life are Catholic. Peter Thiel influenced him to convert to Catholicism. Vance has been criticized by both Pope Francis and his successor, Pope Leo XIV, for his views on immigration and responded by invoking the traditional concept of ordo amoris in Catholic theology, which he interprets as loving his own nationals more than foreigners and equates with the slogan "America First". …