Ohio’s junior U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), has been in the only elected office he’s ever held for a year and a half, and is the second youngest member of that chamber.
He’s been chosen to be potentially a heartbeat away from the presidency, as former president Donald Trump has selected him as his running mate. But in that short time, Vance has established a record on some big issues in this election — though some of his positions have changed.
Vance’s fast track to Trump’s running mate didn’t start out great.
“I'm going to vote third party because I can't stomach Trump. I think that he's noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place," Vance told host Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air in August 2016.
That's just one example of several showing Vance as a self-described “never-Trumper” before he became one of Trump’s biggest supporters.
The Ohio-born former Marine, Ohio State and Yale Law graduate, venture capitalist and author of the best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” once called Trump an idiot and worried he would be “America’s Hitler.”
But when Vance entered the seven-way Republican primary for U.S. Senate in 2022, he scrubbed his social media of Trump criticism and said he’d changed his mind about him as he courted his endorsement.
Vance got it, but the relationship may have still been a work in progress. Some conservatives initially said they opposed Vance as a candidate. And Trump didn't spend much time onstage with Vance at a rally in Delaware in their first appearance together after the endorsement. And at a rally in Nebraska just before the primary vote in Ohio, Trump announced to the crowd that "We’ve endorsed JP, right? JD Mandel."
But since then, Vance has been strongly pro-Trump and vice versa. In the Ohio Debate Commission’s Republican primary debate in March 2022, Vance repeated a false claim said by many Republicans.
“I say it all the time. I think the election was stolen from Trump and specifically, Karen (Kasler), I understand you got your job and you’ve got to sort of throw out the fact-check wand and hope that it disappears all the problems that happened in 2020.”
Over 60 court cases showed no widespread fraud in 2020, and federal cybersecurity officials appointed by Trump have said it was the most secure election in U.S. history. Vance has also said he is skeptical that Vice President Mike Pence was in danger in the Jan. 6 insurrection in 2021.
This fall, as usual, the economy is likely to be the centerpiece issue. At a rally in northeast Ohio in September 2022, Vance called out what he said were “crazy” federal policies dealing with trade, immigration and energy.
“We're not going to rebuild that prosperity unless we stop the stupid decisions, unless we stop putting the interests of the world first and start putting the interests of American citizens first," Vance told the crowd.
Vance once talked up clean energy. In a speech at his alma mater Ohio State in 2020, he said solar could provide a substantial amount of power and said while natural gas is an improvement over dirtier forms of power, it can’t bring a clean energy future. Two years later as a Senate candidate, he talked about an “all of the above” approach to American energy.
“And that means developing our natural gas, which is pretty much the cleanest fuel that's available and can power a modern economy at scale. That means manufacturing things a little bit closer to home so we don't have to rely on the Chinese, which is economically inefficient. The Chinese also have the dirtiest economy in the world," Vance said in an interview for "The State of Ohio".
Vance has also supported Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on all U.S. trading partners and dramatically increase tariffs on China, which some economists have predicted will cut China’s growth rate but also cost consumers who end up paying billions. Vance has supported lowering taxes, but also called for raising taxes on corporations and cutting tax breaks for corporate consolidation.
Vance supports Israel in Gaza and has opposed aid to Ukraine — at one point saying he didn’t care what happens to Ukraine as he’s focused on drugs coming across the Mexican border. Vance wants a finished southern border wall and backs mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. He opposes gun restrictions and has said while states should decide on abortion, he has supported a national ban, as he did in a debate in October 2022.
“I think it’s totally reasonable to say you cannot abort a baby, especially for elective reasons, after 15 weeks of gestation," Vance said at that debate.
Since joining the Senate in January 2021, Vance has co-sponsored bipartisan legislation to help the residents of East Palestine recover from the Norfolk Southern train derailment last year, to protect the Great Lakes and to compensate former American hostages in Iran. He’s also introduced bills to eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs from the federal government, to crack down on university encampments like those set up by pro-Palestinian protestors and to criminalize prescribing gender transition treatments for minors.
If Trump is elected president, Vance, who will be 40 next month, would be the third youngest vice president in U.S. history.
