JD Vance arrived at his first Republican National Convention on Wednesday night to do three things: accept his party’s vice presidential nomination, explain his working-class origin story and demand his party abandon many of the conservative ideals that have defined it for decades.
The Ohio senator, only in office since last year, pitched a Republican Party built around a right-wing populist, “America First” ethos, one aligned with Donald Trump’s vision, if not always his record.
Vance’s remarks, which featured an extended account of his own working-class upbringing in Ohio, sought to portray his running mate, Donald Trump, as the presidential election’s true blue-collar champion, ready to take on everyone from Chinese leaders to immigrants living in the country illegally in hopes of making life easier for the average American.
“President Trump’s vision is so simple and yet so powerful: We’re done catering to Wall Street; we’re committing to the working man,” the senator from Ohio said in a speech that frequently criticized not just President Joe Biden’s White House record but his decades-long career in Washington that began before the 39-year-old Vance was even born.
Vance was, in effect, a working-class character witness for Trump, offering his own life experience — including often colorful accounts of his own family — as proof that he knows Trump’s policies will help the average American.
“Somehow, a real estate developer from New York City by the name of Donald J. Trump was right on all of these issues while Biden was wrong,” Vance said. “Donald Trump knew, even then, that we needed leaders who would put America first.”
Vance’s remarks offered many familiar echoes of Trump’s own long-standing agenda, dwelling on illegal immigration, trade deals and allegations that U.S. foreign allies are too reliant on American financial and military aid. And he was light on policy specifics, focusing instead on a broad condemnation of economic and cultural elites rather than details of how to lower inflation or resolve foreign conflicts.
But the senator’s acceptance speech sent an unmistakable signal of the party’s future ideological direction, in what was his first chance to introduce himself to a large national audience, less than two years after he first won elected office.
Whether a Trump-Vance administration would follow through on its populist promises remains to be seen. In his first administration, Trump mostly backed a traditional Republican economic agenda, supporting a large tax cut that included a windfall for top earners. In an interview published this week, Trump said he would like to reduce the corporate tax rate to 15% and floated the possibility of naming J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon as treasury secretary.
Vance himself spent his years before politics far removed from traditional blue-collar life, moving from Yale Law School to the world of elite Silicon Valley investing under the tutelage of venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
In picking Vance, Trump chose a candidate with relatively little political experience who the former president hoped could nonetheless articulate a blue-collar message built through life experience to voters in key battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
“To the people of Middletown, Ohio, and all the forgotten communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and every corner of our nation, I promise you this: I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from,” Vance said.
His speech — like the best-selling memoir that catapulted his political career, “Hillbilly Elegy” — focused on his upbringing in the working-class suburb of Middletown, Ohio, and more deeply, his generations-long roots to the eastern hills of Kentucky, where “they’re the kind of people who would give you the shirt off their back, even if they can’t afford enough to eat.” He thanked his “Mamaw,” the word he said hillbillies give their grandmothers, and mentioned his own mother’s battle with addiction. Now 10 years sober, his mother proudly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, sitting at her side, “That’s my boy,” when Vance told her story.
In Middletown, Vance said “people spoke their minds, built with their hands and loved their God, family, community and country with their whole hearts. But it was also a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington.”
That his background couldn’t be more different from Trump’s wasn’t lost on the former president’s campaign, which highlighted the contrast before Vance took the stage Wednesday.
Donald Trump Jr., a friend of Vance’s and a close ally who pushed his father to put him in the VP slot, said Vance will “make one hell of a vice president.”
“Look at me and my friend, JD Vance, a kid from Appalachia and a kid from Trump Tower in Manhattan. Worlds apart, yet now we’re both fighting side by side to save the country we love.”
Vance’s speech marks another step in the GOP’s march away from its traditional values of less government interference in the economy and aggressive interventionism abroad, an agenda that for decades dominated the party’s orthodoxy from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan. In one striking passage, Vance criticized Biden over a troika of issues — trade deals like NAFTA, a globalizing economy that led to economic expansion in China and the Iraq War — that once formed the GOP’s economic and foreign policy foundation.
In Vance’s telling, those decisions (all of which he noted were made before he graduated high school) crushed his small-town community and others like it across America.
“And at each step of the way, in small towns like mine in Ohio, or next door in Pennsylvania, or in Michigan and other states across our country, jobs were sent overseas, and our children were sent to war,” Vance said.
In his speech, Vance said the country needs a leader who “answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike.”
Vance’s message of small towns left behind by Washington and lawmakers who care more about foreign interests than Americans is nothing new; it’s the same message that Trump first campaigned on in 2016. What’s changed in the last eight years is Vance, who went from calling Trump’s message to working-class voters “opioid of the masses” to being the chief spokesperson of that same message today.
Vance’s speech did not include any direct reference to abortion, an issue on which he has received relentless criticism from Democrats, or Ukraine, a subject that makes many moderate Republicans uneasy. The closest he got was a call for allies to “share in the burden of securing world peace” and that there should be “no more free rides for nations that betray the generosity of the American taxpayer.”
Vance has previously voiced support for sweeping restrictions on abortion and spoken skeptically of the country’s support for Ukraine as it seeks to repel Russia’s invasion.
He did, however, issue a warning to immigrants on Wednesday, saying that they would be welcome in America — but that welcome comes with conditions.
“America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation. It is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers,” he said.
“But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.”
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Alex Roarty is a reporter at NOTUS. Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.