Background and career
James David Vance (born James Donald Bowman; August 2, 1984) is an American politician, author, venture capitalist, and Marine Corps veteran serving as the 50th vice president of the United States. A member of the Republican Party, he represented the state of Ohio in the United States Senate from 2023 to 2025. Vance was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, and grew up in an unstable, low-income family. After graduating from Middletown High School, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 2003, and served as a military journalist in public affairs until 2007. He earned a bachelor's degree from The Ohio State University and a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School. After a brief career in corporate law, he worked for Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Mithril Capital. Vance rose to national prominence with his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which received widespread attention as scholars and journalists sought to understand white working-class disaffection after Donald Trump's election. The book spoke to a broader political realignment sweeping post-industrial Appalachia and the Midwest, and was adapted into a film in 2020. He grew up a Protestant, but converted to Roman Catholicism in 2019. He is the second Catholic vice president of the United States, after Joe Biden. Vance was originally critical of Trump's candidacy, but became a strong supporter while running for Senate. He was elected to the Senate in 2022, defeating Democratic nominee Tim Ryan in the general election after winning a crowded Republican primary with Trump's endorsement. Vance was selected as Trump's running mate in the 2024 presidential election and resigned from the Senate before his inauguration as vice president. He became the first Marine Corps veteran, the first Iraq War veteran, and first millennial in U.S. history to serve as vice president. During his tenure as vice president, he has also served as finance chair of the Republican National Committee. He has been described as a national conservative and right-wing populist, aligning himself with the "postliberal" New Right movement. Vance opposes immigration, abortion, childlessness, gender-affirming care for minors, and gun control. He often cites Catholic theology as an influence on his views, but both Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV have criticized him for misrepresenting church teachings. Vance has also been a strong supporter of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations.
Vance was born James Donald Bowman on August 2, 1984, in Middletown, Ohio, the city in which he was also raised. His mother is Beverly Carol Aikins (née Vance), and his father was Donald Ray Bowman (1959–2023); they divorced when he was a toddler. Vance wrote in his book Hillbilly Elegy that he was of Scots-Irish descent. He grew up in an Appalachian American culture, spending summers with relatives in Jackson, Kentucky. Vance attended Roosevelt Elementary School and Vail Middle School, which were demolished in 2008 and 2012, respectively. He briefly attended West Elkton Elementary School for fourth grade. Vance has written that his childhood was marked by poverty and abuse, and that his mother struggled with drug addiction. She worked as a registered nurse when Vance was a toddler, where she reportedly got addicted to pharmaceutical drugs after one of her co-workers offered her Vicodin for a headache. Soon thereafter, she was fired and lost her nursing license after she got caught stealing morphine. He and his elder sister, Lindsay, were raised primarily by their maternal grandparents, James Lee Vance (1929–1997) and Bonnie Eloise Blanton (1933–2005), whom they called "Papaw" and "Mamaw". In 1990, after he was adopted by his mother's third husband, Bob Hamel, his mother changed his name to James David Hamel to remove his biological father's first name and surname and to use an uncle's first name, David. Vance therefore kept his first name and his nickname, JD. He eventually changed his surname to his mother's maiden name, Vance, in April 2013.
Vance attended Middletown High School from 1999 until he graduated in 2003 with an honors diploma. In 2007, he began studying at The Ohio State University, where he graduated with highest honors in 2009 with a Bachelor of Arts in political science and philosophy. In 2010, Vance entered Yale Law School, where he won a staff position on The Yale Law Journal and worked with a group of its editors who primarily checked citations. Vance's future wife was the journal's executive developmental editor. At Yale, he befriended fellow Ohio native and future Republican politician Vivek Ramaswamy. During his first year, Professor Amy Chua persuaded Vance to begin writing his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Vance also initiated a rapport with Peter Thiel after attending his 2011 talk at Yale. In 2010–2011, Vance wrote for David Frum's "FrumForum" website under the name J. D. Hamel. Although Hillbilly Elegy says he adopted his grandparents' surname of Vance upon his marriage in 2014, the name change actually occurred in April 2013 (his full name therefore changing to James David Vance), as he was about to graduate from Yale. Vance obtained his Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School in May 2013 and was admitted to the bar in Kentucky later that year.
After graduating from high school, Vance enlisted in the United States Marine Corps as a private, serving as a combat correspondent (military journalist) with the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. During his four years of service, he was deployed to Iraq in 2005 for six months in a non-combat role, writing articles and taking photographs. In December 2005, he was part of a group of Marines that held a roundtable discussion with Vice President Dick Cheney. He attained the rank of corporal, and his decorations include the Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal and the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal. In 2007, Vance left the military and used the G. I. Bill to study at Ohio State.
After graduating from law school, Vance worked for Republican senator John Cornyn. He spent a year as a law clerk for Judge David Bunning of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, then worked at the law firm Sidley Austin, beginning a brief career as a corporate lawyer. Having practiced law for slightly under two years, Vance moved to San Francisco to work in the technology industry as a venture capitalist. Between 2016 and 2017, he was a principal at Peter Thiel's firm, Mithril Capital. In June 2016, Harper published Vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. The memoir recounts the Appalachian culture and socioeconomic problems of Vance's upbringing. Hillbilly Elegy was on The New York Times Best Seller list in 2016 and 2017. The Times listed it among "6 Books to Help Understand Trump's Win", and Vance was profiled in The Washington Post, which called him "the voice of the Rust Belt". In The New Republic, Sarah Jones criticized Vance as "liberal media's favorite white trash–splainer" and a "false prophet of blue America", calling the book "little more than a list of myths about welfare queens". Hillbilly Elegy's success helped propel Vance into contact with social elites, and he began writing a column for The New York Times. Vance later said that his interactions with social elites from this time, particularly their perceived disdain for "the people he grew up with", helped shape his later views. Vance worked at a biotech company named Circuit Therapeutics from 2015 to 2017. Its chairman, Frederic Moll, said he hired Vance for his intelligence, legal qualifications, and connection to Thiel. Vance tried to get Mithril Capital to invest in Circuit but Mithril passed. Colin Greenspon, then managing director at Mithril, liked Vance and got him to move to Mithril in 2016. At Mithril, Vance clashed with Mithril's co-founder and managing director Ajay Royan. He decided to leave in 2017. Bloomberg reports he deleted all traces of Mithril from his LinkedIn profile. Vance moved back to Ohio, where he published an op-ed in The New York Times with the headline "Why I'm moving home", in which he complained about "highly educated transplants" in Silicon Valley. In another interview, he said elite tech crowds wielded "political-financial power in combination with a certain condescension". In 2017, Vance joined Revolution LLC, an investment firm founded by Steve Case. Greenspon left Mithril and joined Vance at Revolution in 2018. At Revolution, Vance was tasked with expanding the "Rise of the Rest" initiative, which focuses on growing investments in underserved regions outside Silicon Valley and New York City. Vance was a CNN contributor from 2017 to 2018. In 2017, Vance sold the film rights to Hillbilly Elegy to Imagine Entertainment. In April 2017, Ron Howard signed on to direct the film version, which was released in select theaters on November 11, 2020, and later that month on Netflix. In 2019, Vance was on the board of advisors of the With Honor Fund, a Super PAC that helps veterans run for office. From 2020 to 2023, he was on the board of advisors of American Moment, a networking and training organization for young conservatives that is affiliated with Project 2025. In 2019, Vance and Chris Buskirk co-founded the conservative political advocacy group Rockbridge Network. That year, he also co-founded venture capital firm Narya Capital in Cincinnati with financial backing from Thiel, Eric Schmidt, and Marc Andreessen. In 2020, he raised $93 million for the firm. With Thiel and former Trump adviser Darren Blanton, Vance invested in Rumble, a Canadian online video platform popular with the political right.
In December 2016, Vance said he planned to move to Ohio and would consider starting a nonprofit or running for office. In Ohio, he started Our Ohio Renewal, a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization focused on education, addiction, and other "social ills" he had mentioned in his memoir. According to a 2017 archived capture of the nonprofit's website, the advisory board members were Keith Humphreys, Jamil Jivani, Yuval Levin, and Sally Satel. According to a 2020 capture of the website, those four remained in those positions throughout the organization's existence. Our Ohio Renewal closed by 2021 with sparse achievements. According to Jivani, the organization's director of law and policy, its work was derailed by Jivani's cancer diagnosis. It raised around $221,000 in 2017 (including $80,000 from Vance himself) and spent most of its revenue on overhead costs and travel. In subsequent years, it raised less than $50,000. During Vance's 2022 U.S. Senate campaign, Tim Ryan, the Democratic nominee, said the charity was a front for Vance's political ambitions, pointing to reports that the organization paid a Vance political adviser and conducted public opinion polling, while its efforts to address addiction failed. Vance denied the characterization. Our Ohio Renewal's tax filings show that in its first year, it spent more (over $63,000) on "management services" provided by its executive director Jai Chabria, who became Vance's chief campaign strategist, than it did on programs to fight opioid abuse. In 2017, Vance formed a similarly named 501(c)(3) organization, Our Ohio Renewal Foundation, which raised around $69,000 from 2017 to 2023. As of September 2024, the foundation had not spent any funds since 2019. According to the Associated Press (AP) and a 2019 ProPublica investigation, the charity's biggest accomplishment, sending psychiatrist Sally Satel to Ohio's Appalachian region for a yearlong residency in 2018, was "tainted" by the ties among Satel, her employer, American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Purdue Pharma, in the form of knowledge exchange between Satel and Purdue and financial support from Purdue to AEI. Satel denied having any relationship with Purdue or any knowledge of its donations to AEI.
