Introducing himself to the nation after being tapped as Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance used his Wednesday night address to the Republican National Convention to share the story of his hardscrabble upbringing and make the case that his party best understands the challenges facing struggling Americans.
The 39-year-old Ohio senator may be a relative political unknown, having served in the Senate for less than two years, but he wasted no time in making a powerful impression on the American people. In his first prime-time address since Trump made his pick, Vance cast himself as a fighter for the forgotten working class, making a direct appeal to the Rust Belt voters who helped drive Trump’s surprise 2016 victory and voicing their anger and frustration.
“In small towns like mine in Ohio, or next door in Pennsylvania, or in Michigan, in states all across our country, jobs were sent overseas and children were sent to war,” he said.
“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,” he continued. “I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from.”
Vance, who rapidly morphed in recent years from a bitter critic of the former president to an aggressive defender, is positioned to become the future leader of the party and the torch-bearer of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” political movement, which has reshaped the Republican Party and broken longtime political norms. As the first millennial to join the top of a major party ticket, he enters the race as questions about the age of the men at the top – 78-year-old Trump and 81-year-old Biden – have been high on the list of voters’ concerns.
At his first fundraiser as Trump’s running mate earlier Wednesday, Vance was introduced by Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, who said Trump’s decision to choose him wasn’t about picking a running mate or the next vice president.
“Donald Trump’s decision this week in picking JD Vance was about the future,” he said. “Donald Trump picked a man in JD Vance that is the future of the country, the future of the Republican Party, the future of the America First movement.”
In his prime-time speech, Vance shared his story of growing up poor in Kentucky and Ohio, his mother addicted to drugs and his father absent. He later joined the Marines, graduated from Yale Law School, and went on to the highest levels of U.S. politics – an embodiment of an American dream he said is now in short supply.
“Never in my wildest imagination could I have believed that I’d be standing here tonight,” he said.
The first millennial on a major-party ticket, Vance spent much of his speech talking up Trump and going after Biden, using his relative youth to draw a contrast with the 81-year-old president.
“Joe Biden has been a politician in Washington as long as I’ve been alive,” Vance said. “For half a century he’s been a champion of every single policy initiative to make America weaker and poorer.”
The crowd inside the convention hall welcomed Vance warmly. They erupted into chants of “Mamaw!” in honor of his grandmother, and chanted “JD’s Mom!” after he introduced his mother, a former addict who has been sober for 10 years.
Vance was introduced Wednesday night by his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, who talked of the stark difference between how she and her husband grew up – she a middle-class immigrant from San Diego, and he from a low-income Appalachian family. She called him “a meat and potatoes kind of guy” who became a vegetarian and learned to cook Indian food for her mother.
Along with his relative youth, Vance is new to some of the hallmarks of Republican presidential politics: This year’s gathering is the first RNC that Vance has attended, according to a Trump campaign official who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Trump, who entered the arena to a version of the song “It’s a Man’s World” by James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti, watched from his family box.
Convention organizers had stressed a theme of unity, even before Trump survived an attempted assassination at a rally in Pennsylvania Saturday. Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election and the subsequent attack on the U.S. Capitol, officials said, would be absent from the stage.
But that changed with former White
