MILWAUKEE — The man who would be vice president formally introduced himself to a jubilant Republican National Convention on Wednesday evening in Wisconsin — and to voters nationwide. And he had a very compelling story to tell.
Sen. James David “J.D.” Vance, R-Ohio, former President Donald Trump’s freshly minted running mate, accepted the nomination and addressed his fellow Republicans, his fellow Americans. What many heard was a guy who, despite being a millennial millionaire, shares an all-too-common upbringing in impoverished rural America. Vance, the author of the best-selling Hillbilly Elegy, literally wrote the book on it.
At 39, Vance is one of the youngest vice presidential candidates in American history, nearly 40 years Trump’s junior. The significant age spread is by design in an election year where, once again, two elderly men — at least at the moment — are the major party standard bearers on the ballot.
From Humble Beginnings
By many measures, Vance is the epitome of the American Dream. He grew up in poverty, a “family tradition” in rust-belt Middletown, Ohio, and in the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky. The son of a drug-addicted mother and a father who left him, Vance, as they say, rose above his circumstances. He went to college on the G.I. Bill after serving in the Marines and the Iraq War. He earned his law degree from Yale and made a very comfortable living in venture capital. Vance’s bleak memoir was made into a movie in 2020, a couple of years before his successful Senate run.
“Never in my wildest imagination could I have believed that I would be standing here tonight,” Vance told the thousands of conventiongoers assembled at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum and the millions more watching across the country.
God and Mamaw
While his parents were absent from much of his childhood, Vance said he had God.
And Mamaw.
The senator’s “guardian angel” grandmother raised him. She was tough as nails, Vance said, a Christian woman who loved the Lord nearly as much as she loved the “F word.” Mamaw once told her grandson that if she ever caught him again hanging out with a kid who was a notorious drug dealer in town, she’d run the boy over with her car.
“And she said, J.D., no one would ever find out about it,” Vance recalled. The convention hall erupted in laughter, then echoed with a chant of “Mamaw.” The GOPers love them some Mamaw. They seemed pretty taken by her successful grandson too.
The Republican vice presidential candidate said he made it out of the generational poverty that has trapped so many of his family and friends. He escaped through hard work, with the help of his guardian angel, and by the grace of God, Vance said. Every now and then, he said, he’ll get a call from a relative back home asking if he remembered this person or that. As a face in time fills his mind, Vance said he’s often told that the old neighbor or schoolmate has died of a drug overdose.
‘Failed and Failed’
“As usual, America’s ruling class wrote the check. Communities like mine paid the price,” he said. He then took aim at the members of said ruling class — Democrats and Republicans — who have over the last generation-plus enriched themselves while average Americans have suffered. The people on the list of D.C. elites include Republican President George W. Bush and Democrat Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. None more, Vance stressed, than career politician Biden, hungry for another term in a rematch with Trump.
“For decades, that divide between the few — with their power and comfort in Washington — and the rest of us only widened. From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnating wages, the people who governed this country have failed and failed again,” he said.
There is, of course, according to Vance, one exception to the governing class rule: businessman Donald Trump, who in 2016 ran on nothing short of a revolution to “drain the swamp.” Vance wasn’t on board the Trump train then, blasting Trump as “reprehensible” during his first run. Vance has had a change of heart since those early days, becoming one of the more ardent defenders of Trump’s vision of “making America Great Again.” Biden’s curious victory in 2020 put the MAGA agenda on hold. Trump’s new running mate sounds like he is champing at the bit to help the former president bring it back and make the case, particularly in the critical swing states, for a return to Trumpenomics and homeland sanity.
“It’s about the auto worker in Michigan, wondering why out-of-touch politicians are destroying your jobs,” Vance said. “It’s about the factory worker in Wisconsin, who makes things with their hands and is proud of American craftsmanship.”
“It’s about the energy worker in Pennsylvania and Ohio who doesn’t understand why Joe Biden is willing to buy energy from tinpot dictators across the world when he could buy it from his own citizens right here in our own country,” Vance hammered.
Trump’s running mate wasn’t simply speaking to the party; he was attempting to connect with what he called the “cast aside and forgotten.” In the tradition of Trump.
The Federalist’s Mark Hemingway, also covering the convention with wife and Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway, told me in a “Federalist Radio Hour” podcast that the GOP establishment types aren’t happy with the Vance VP pick, a good sign Trump made the right call.
Meanwhile, Democrats and their corporate media public-relations firms have spent the past couple of days trying to diminish Trump’s lieutenant, as the corporate media are wont to do. The Atlantic’s Stuart Stevens lamented Ohio transforming from a swing state to a dependable red. He decried the Buckeye State’s abandonment of weak-kneed RINOs for Trumpicans like Vance.
“But don’t make the mistake of thinking this transformation was the result of a hostile takeover; that implies there was a fight. The truth is that the old guard surrendered to forces contrary to what it had espoused as lifelong values,” Stevens whined.
The old guard, Vance tried to convey to voters, is part of why this republic is in so much trouble.
‘The American Story’
David Arredondo, former chairman of the Lorain County Republican Party, part of the Cleveland metropolitan area, told me Vance brings pluses and minuses to the ticket, but a lot more positives than negatives.
“He checks all the boxes,” Arredondo said. Vance is young and a veteran. And Vance’s experience with poverty and family drug addiction, Arredondo said, makes him relatable to voters billionaire Trump needs to win the election.
“It’s the American story of the person who started from nothing and became great,” he said.
As the former county GOP chairman noted, Vance won a lot of Ohio hearts and minds following the devastating train derailment in East Palestine in early 2023. He was there. So was Trump, handing out bottled water and standing with a broken community as Biden and his competence-challenged transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, were slow to show up to the conservative-leaning community near the border of Pennsylvania. Biden waited a year. He was not well received.
“Vance’s quick response to the train derailment and advocacy for local residents landed him in the spotlight and earned him a front row seat in the news for months. Trump joined Vance and other Ohio lawmakers on Feb. 22, 2023, to shake the hands of local residents and distribute water, food and other supplies to those desperately in need of necessities,” Fox News reported shortly after Trump announced Vance as his second-in-command.
Vance closed with a vow to the “cast aside and forgotten.”
“To the people of Middletown, Ohio, and all the forgotten communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and every corner of our nation, I promise you this: I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from,” he said.