JD Vance’s confusing evolution from liberal touchstone to Maga superstar
JD Vance regaled the attendees of the Republican national convention on Wednesday with stories of his childhood – a life of poverty and struggle, surrounded by people who he said had found themselves at the mercy of economic downturns and forgotten by the country’s governing elites.
“My work taught me that there is still so much talent and grit in the American heartland,” said Vance, who had just been anointed Donald Trump’s vice-presidential nominee. “But for these places to thrive, my friends, we need a leader who fights for the people who built this country.”
It was a remarkable departure from his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, in which Vance recounted childhood hardships but also laid out the bracing argument – articulated in the opening pages of his book – that “culture” and laziness, not economic circumstance, “encourages social decay instead of counteracting it”. The controversial book furthered the popular conservative argument that cultural backwardness was the root cause of American poverty.
Related: Hillbilly Elegy: what can the book and movie tell us about JD Vance?
Since the book’s publication, which propelled him into political superstardom, Vance’s worldview – or at least, the one that he espouses publicly – has changed dramatically. Once a critic of Trump’s, embraced by liberals who turned to his memoir for insights into the minds of the rural white poor, Vance has transformed into a Maga superstar, securing a seat in the US Senate with Trump’s endorsement and spending his first 18 months in office pursuing an isolationist foreign policy and fighting the culture war at home.
Vance has in the last five years fallen into lockstep with Trump. He has opposed US involvement in foreign conflicts – including US support for Ukraine – and has backed nativist policies at home. In the wake of the 2020 election, he called the results into question.
And although Vance will almost certainly lean on his heartland roots on the campaign trail – in no small part because states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are key to a Republican victory – he has largely left his early life in suburban Ohio in the rearview.
‘Our homes are a chaotic mess’
Vance’s story begins in the mill town of Middletown, Ohio. The steel mill, which remains a major local employer in the city of 50,000, once drew thousands of workers who migrated from the coal country of Appalachia, which encompasses mountain towns from south-western New York to northern Mississippi, to the industrial midwest throughout the 1900s. Vance’s grandfather was one of those workers, leaving his home in Jackson, Kentucky, for a job at the steel mill in Middletown.
After decades of accelerating production, amid slowing demand and technological change, the steel industry began to shrink in the 1970s, devastating communities across the midwest. Mass layoffs left areas of high unemployment and poverty; in his book, Vance describes how the opioid epidemic further immiserated many of the diasporic Appalachians whose parents and grandparents had come to Middletown for work.
“Our homes are a chaotic mess,” wrote Vance of his Middletown community. “We scream and yell at each other like we’re spectators at a football game. At least one member of the family uses drugs – sometimes, both.”
In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance chronicles his mother’s struggle with addiction and the rotation of men – some of them violent – who came in and out of her life. Vance, who grew up estranged from his father, credits his grandmother, “Mamaw”, with raising him and pushing him to work hard in school; it is her family, and his trips to Kentucky with her, that gave him his sense of Appalachian identity.
Travis Rigas, who was friends with Vance in high school, said the two bonded over an unspoken understanding of family dysfunction.
“You know how people can turn on a personality that makes them seem outgoing and fun?” said Rigas. “That was me, and that was JD as well – and it was related to those family dynamics that we both kind of suffered through.”
When Rigas decided to change his last name to mother’s maiden name, Rigas, he said Vance reached out to ask him about the process. Like Rigas, Vance took on the surname of the woman who raised him, leaving his father’s last name behind.
When Vance left Middletown he joined the US Marines, serving as a combat journalist from 2003 to 2007, including a deployment to Iraq for six months. When he later attended Ohio State University and Yale law school, it was an escape. Addiction – and the ravages of addiction on his family – had played a central role in Vance’s young life.
Leaving was a way out.
“I think a shared goal for most of us was getting out of Middletown, because we only knew what we saw,” said Rigas.
At Yale, Vance developed a close relationship with Amy Chua, one of several prominent mentors who would help him move through the world of elite institutions and politics. It was also there that he met, and as he tells it, immediately fell in love with his classmate Usha Chilukuri – whose presence made him “feel at home” in a place where he often felt out of place. They married a year after graduation.
Vance worked for a stint in corporate law – before moving to San Francisco, where the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, another important mentor of Vance’s, ushered him into the world of venture capitalism. Vance’s firm Narya, seeded by Thiel, splurged on startups including the rightwing video streaming company Rumble.
Vance’s tight connections to the world of Silicon Valley wealth followed him into political life.
A confusing political record
After accepting the nomination to be Trump’s running mate, Vance plans to visit his home town for a campaign rally on Monday. He will almost certainly be well received by many in Middletown, where, with the exception of a few blue pockets, voters overwhelmingly chose Trump in 2020.
But his political record is not as straightforward.
The day after Trump shocked the world by winning the presidential election in 2016, Vance founded Our Ohio Renewal, a charity with the mission of working “with like-minded organizations” to “enhance economic opportunities [and] the common good of the community”.
Matt Hildreth, executive director of the progressive group Rural Organizing, was living in Ohio when Vance shot to fame through his book the same year. “He was at the time very anti-Trump and was willing to have a conversation about what was happening in small towns and rural communities. I was living in Columbus, he was moving back to Columbus, so I reached out to him,” he said.
Hildreth never heard back from Vance.
During its short existence, Vance’s charity appears to have achieved little. According to the filings, the group commissioned a $45,000 survey, polling Ohioans on “social, cultural and general welfare needs”.
According to the charity’s 2017 tax return, the last available filing for Our Ohio Renewal, Vance’s business and political associates formed the leadership team. Jai Chabria, the executive director of the organization, would go on to serve as a strategist for Vance’s successful 2022 Senate campaign. The director of the organization, Ethan Fallang, a partner in JD Vance’s venture capital firm Narya, serves on the board of the rightwing video streaming service Rumble.
Moreover, the group employed Sally Satel, a doctor with ties to Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical giant that once manufactured OxyContin and which pleaded guilty to employing marketing strategies that fuelled the opioid crisis. Satel, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from Purdue, has said she has not taken money from the company.
Our Ohio Renewal was mothballed in 2021, before Vance ran for Senate. Running against the Democrat Tim Ryan, Vance’s successful Senate campaign owed much to an estimated $15m in donations from the billionaire Peter Thiel, a record-breaking amount for a US Senate race.
“There were so many people who had hope in [Vance] in 2016, 2017. He was being credited as the guy who knew what these communities needed,” said Hildreth. “He’s friends with billionaires. He could have brought billions of dollars into Ohio if he wanted to. He didn’t.”
In his 18 months in the Senate, Vance did introduce 33 bills, of which not one has passed, in part due to Democrats controlling the chamber. On one hand, Vance has lined up alongside far-right firebrands such as the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on a bill that would see certain gender-affirming care for minors criminalised, and another banning the federal government from instituting mask mandates in places such as schools or public transportation.
On the other, he has worked with Democrats to introduce a bill requiring certain taxpayer-funded new technologies be manufactured in the US.
In 2023, Vance co-sponsored the Fend Off Fentanyl Act, a bill meant to “impose sanctions with respect to trafficking of illicit fentanyl and its precursors by transnational criminal organizations, including cartels”.
However, Vance later voted against his own measure when it was included in a larger bill that encompassed sending aid to Ukraine. Vance’s isolationist foreign policy is one area that has rallied support from many on the right, but chafed others – including his constituents.
“Him being a former marine, which I respect, his stance on Ukraine doesn’t make any sense to me,” says Middletown resident Scotty Robertson. “It’s interesting that he is in favor of Putin dominating Europe, to be so opposed to Nato”
In some ways, the lives of Vance and Robertson are similar. Robertson, a pastor at an American Baptist church, was born and raised in southern West Virginia, 83 miles east of Vance’s ancestral village in eastern Kentucky. His grandfather was a coalminer and labour organiser.
But that’s where any similarities end, Robertson says.
Robertson is concerned by what Vance may – or may not do – for Middletown moving forward. In March, Cleveland-Cliffs, a cornerstone employer in Middletown, announced 1,200 new jobs secured in part by $500m in federal money from the Biden administration. But in Vance’s term, Robertson says he has seen nothing happen for Middletown as a result of that.
“Clearly JD Vance is from here, but I can’t see public policy that is being proposed that is actually going to help Middletownians.”
For Rigas, Vance’s high school friend who describes himself as politically left-leaning, Vance’s remarkable ascension into national politics has been bittersweet. He’s proud of Vance for his wild and improbable success. And he’s saddened – if not entirely surprised – by his far-right turn.
Trump had captured the conservative movement; Vance, Rigas knew, had long aspired to a life in politics. The choice to embrace the Maga right was probably one made largely by ambition.
“My mom has reminded me over and over,” said Rigas, “of when I came home from school one day in freshman year and said, ‘My friend JD is going to be president.’”
‘An average, hardworking American’
The impact of Hillbilly Elegy and Vance’s philosophy have left a mixed impact on his hometown – one that has come into sharper relief since he became the vice-presidential nominee.
Outside an auto shop in Middletown, Brandon Ingram sits in the shade, surrounded by a fold-out canopy covered in Trump and Vance paraphernalia. For Ingram, who is from west Tennessee, there’s one thing that makes Vance such a promising politician.
“He’s just an average, hardworking American. Everything he got, he worked for,” he says. “That’s what you wanna see.” Vance’s youth, says Ingram, is also a major reason he believes he would make a good vice-president.
For some Black residents in Middletown, however, Vance’s book contained glaring and offensive omissions.
“Middletown has a rich history, but it has a history of segregation,” said Celeste Didlick-Davis, the president of Middletown’s NAACP, who teaches classes on family poverty at Miami University in Ohio. The book, Davis said, was poorly received by Black readers – in large part, she said, because “JD Vance’s world did not include Black people.”
Davis, who was raised in Middletown, described the city as a place with a vibrant and historic Black community, but where segregation has persisted de facto since her youth. She described the community hub provided by Douglass pool – since closed – which drew Black Ohioans from across the state to swim and relax during the summer.
“Vance gives us a very sanitised, very white view of Middletown,” said Davis. “But we existed.”
Meanwhile, Vance’s broader depictions of Appalachian life back in his grandparents’ hometown in Kentucky were rejected by readers from the region who saw his take on “hill people” as flat and stereotypical.
“Vance’s description of a Jackson, Kentucky, where ‘people are hardworking, except of course for the many food-stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work,’” Neema Avashia wrote last week, “allowed liberals and conservatives alike to write Appalachia off as beyond saving, and its problems as self-created, and thus, deserved.”
Since Vance left, the opioid crisis has continued unabated. In the late 2010s, Middletown faced one of the highest opioid overdose death rates in Ohio. From 2016 to 2018, the city experienced 1,991 drug overdoses that led to 204 deaths. And by July 2020, Middletown’s Butler county ranked fifth of 88 Ohio counties for overdose deaths.
“I enjoyed his book,” said Jackie Phillips, the health commissioner for the city of Middletown, of Hillbilly Elegy. Phillips said she met Vance when his book came out in 2016 but hasn’t followed his political career closely since.
But like Robertson and many others, she said she’s disappointed that he hasn’t done more. And as he steps up to a national platform, those doubts could follow him on the campaign trail.
“He’s had the opportunity,” she said. “Maybe he can do something in the future, but when you have the opportunity to do something you should do it regardless.”
