Who is Vice President-elect JD Vance, Trump's heir apparent?

After Donald Trump's victory in US elections, JD Vance is officially Trump's heir apparent as vice president-elect. 

When he was picked as Donald Trump's running mate in July, JD Vance's rise through the Republican ranks was confirmed. Many pundits see him as heir apparent to Trump's "Make America Great Again" movement and the favorite to be the Republican presidential candidate in 2028.

While Trump's brash brand of politicking is a natural extension of the larger-than-life persona he carved out over four decades in the public eye, Vance, a 40-year-old father of three, is from another side of America, and his rise to the vice presidency has been unconventional by Republican standards.

Vance was born James David Bowman and raised primarily by his maternal grandparents — whose surname he later adopted — in a steel manufacturing town in Ohio while his mother struggled with drug and alcohol use. 

After graduating from high school, Vance joined the US Marines and served for four years, including a six-month deployment to Iraq in a noncombat role as a military journalist in 2005. After leaving the Marines, he graduated from Ohio State University and Yale Law School. He later switched from law to tech investing in California, where he started his own venture capital firm.

In Yale he also met his wife Usha Chilukuri. The couple got married in 2014 and has two sons and a daughter.

'Never Trumper' turns into MAGA senator

It was in May 2016 that Vance entered the public eye with the publication of his acclaimed "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis." The bestseller reflected on Vance's upbringing in Appalachia and was considered a window into the lives of people in the declining manufacturing region known as the Rust Belt just months before slim-margin wins in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania swept Trump to power in 2016.

In a 2016 interview on NPR, Vance said he couldn't "stomach Trump" and would consider voting for Hillary Clinton, but also, somewhat prophetically, suggested that the Trump phenomenon was buoyed by the support of white working-class voters who "aren't necessarily economically destitute but in some ways feel very culturally isolated and very pessimistic about the future. That's one of the biggest predictors of whether someone will support Donald Trump. It may be the biggest predictor."

Among those heaping praise on the book was PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. The New York Times reported in July that Thiel  — a long-standing mentor of Vance's and one of the first high-profile Silicon Valley figures to support Trump in 2016 — brokered an initial meeting between the former president and his future VP in 2021.

Vance would recant his position as "a Never Trump guy" when he successfully ran in the 2022 Republican primary to represent Ohio in the US Senate.

Campaign controversies and polished performances

Shortly after his selection as running mate, a 2021 interview resurfaced in which Vance described the United States as a country run by "childless cat ladies" — a comment rebuked by Democrats, as well as Taylor Swift and other celebrities. 

Vance later raised the ire of communities in his home state of Ohio after he shared false claims made on social media that Haitian immigrants were eating pet dogs in Springfield. Trump amplified those false claims in his debate against Kamala Harris. 

Vance's own debate performance against Tim Walz saw him come away with a narrow win in the eyes of critics. His disciplined effort was summarized by the press as "polished" (Politico), "crisp" and "dominant" (The New York Times) and "slick" (CNN). But the elephant in the room was his inability to concede that Trump had lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, something his opponent made sure to seize on. 

Is Vance a window into the Republicans' future?

While Trump will dominate the headlines as president, a close eye will be kept on Vance's approach to key policy issues such as abortion, immigration and foreign policy — and how his stances could shape the Republican Party's post-Trump era.

Though the vice president's job is seldom in the spotlight, with Trump reentering office at 78, there is a higher than usual chance Vance could end up sitting in the Oval Office at some point in the next four years.

Edited by: Sean M. Sinico