JD Vance, a 40-year-old senator who transformed himself from a biting critic of Donald Trump to one of his fiercest defenders, was elected the next vice-president of the United States on Wednesday, becoming the third youngest and among the least experienced and most polarising politicians ever to hold the office. The country’s 50th vice- president will be sworn in just two years after assuming his first public office as a senator from Ohio. Vance is unlike any other vice-president before him in the modern era: None has started the job with such an extensive public record of condemning his or her boss.
He rose to national prominence with his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” a bestseller that liberal voters devoured to better understand Trump’s victory and the frustrations of the white working class that had put him in the White House. Vance also seemed an ideal translator for Blue America as a Midwestern conservative who detested the new president, likening him in an essay to “cultural heroin.” But Vance then started professing a change of heart and mind about the leader of his party as he prepared his own initial run for office. Trump not only forgave his young convert but also rewarded him with a game-changing endorsement in a fiercely competitive, four-way Senate primary and then, in the general election, helped push Vance’s underperforming campaign over the finish line.
Now, Vance is more politically indebted to Trump than any other vice-president has been to the top of the ticket in modern times, said Joel Goldstein, a professor emeritus at the St Louis University School of Law who has spent decades studying the vice-presidency.
Raised by his grandmother in a working-class town in Ohio, Vance will soon be first in the presidential line of succession. His against-all-odds upbringing was a key component of his speeches on the campaign trail as he introduced himself to voters and sought common ground with Trump’s base of blue-collar supporters. But Vance also has strong connections to deep-pocketed donors in Silicon Valley, including Peter Thiel, the iconoclastic tech pioneer and billionaire investor. Thiel, who hired Vance at his investment firm in 2017, spent $15 million on a super PAC that supported the Ohioan’s Senate bid in 2022.
Now, Vance has been all but anointed by Trump as the successor to the MAGA movement, driven by blue-collar voters who helped bolster two successful presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2024. He performed on the trail just as Trump had instructed, as an indefatigable critic of Vice-President Kamala Harris while delivering a sharp debate performance that cast himself as a more three-dimensional figure than the caricature portrayed by his critics.
Vance will become the nation’s youngest vice-president since 1953, when Richard Nixon, who celebrated his 40th birthday just days before inauguration, was sworn in as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice-president. John C. Breckinridge, who was 36 when he assumed office in 1857 as James Buchanan’s vice-president, holds the record for the nation’s youngest vice-president. Both of the younger vice-presidents eventually sought the White House themselves. — NYT
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