Now, Vance is stepping into a role that has at times seemed unfillable: the political partner to a man who considers himself to be politically peerless. In the Senate, Vance has cultivated a dual identity as key Trump ally and leader of the GOP’s populist-national wing. But who will he be as a vice presidential candidate?

Here — culled from his memoir, his writing and public remarks, his voluminous tweets and an extensive series of interviews he conducted with POLITICO Magazine earlier this year — are some clues.

1.

“I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve accomplished nothing great in my life,” Vance wrote in the introduction to Hillbilly Elegy, his bestselling 2016 memoir about his life growing up in a working-class family in post-industrial Ohio. “I am not a senator, a governor, or a former cabinet secretary. I haven’t started a billion-dollar company or a world-changing non-profit.”

2.

In 2015, two years after graduating from Yale Law School, Vance joined Mithril Capital, a venture capital firm run by the Silicon Valley scion Peter Thiel.

3.

In 2016, he announced his plans to move back to Ohio from California to start Our Ohio Renewal, a nonprofit dedicated to “mak[ing] it easier for disadvantaged children to achieve their dreams.”

4.

In November 2022, he was elected to the United States Senate from Ohio with the help of over $10 million in donations from Thiel. It was his first public office.

5.

On Monday, he was named Trump’s running mate.

6.

Reflecting on his first encounter with Thiel in 2011, Vance wrote: “[Thiel] articulated a feeling … that I was obsessed with achievement in [itself] not as an end to something meaningful, but to win a social competition. My worry that I had prioritized striving over character took on a heightened significance: striving for what?”

7.

He was born James Donald Bowman on Aug. 2, 1984, in Middletown, Ohio, an industrial city 30 miles north of Cincinnati and 20 miles south of Dayton.

8.

His maternal grandparents, Jim and Bonnie Vance — known as “Papaw “and “Mamaw” — moved to Middletown in the late 1940s from Jackson, Kentucky, a holler in the heart of southeastern Kentucky’s coal region. Jim was 16; Bonnie was 13 — and pregnant with Jim’s child. They were unmarried at the time.

9.

Vance is descended from “hillbilly royalty” on his father’s side: His grandfather’s distant cousin — also named Jim Vance — married into the Hatfield family and is rumored to have committed the murder that instigated the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feud.

10.

Vance’s biological parents, Donald Bowman and Bev Vance, divorced when he was a toddler. He was later adopted by his mother’s new husband, Bob Hamel, and changed his name to James David Hamel. The name change preserved his nickname, J.D.

11.

Bev and Bob later divorced, and Bev struggled with drug addiction. Vance was raised primarily by his grandparents — who were, he wrote in Hillbilly Elegy, “without question or qualification, the best things that ever happened to me.”

12.

Mamaw and Papaw were union Democrats (except in 1984, when Papaw voted for Ronald Reagan). In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance described their political outlook as: “All politicians might be crooks, but if there were any exceptions, they were undoubtedly members of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition.”

13.

Growing up, Vance spent his summer vacations visiting his great-grandmother and extended family in Jackson. “I always distinguished ‘my address’ from ‘my home,’” he wrote in Hillbilly Elegy. “My address was where I spent most of my time with my mother and sister, wherever that might be. But my home never changed: my great-grandmother’s house, in the holler, in Jackson, Kentucky.”

14.

“To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart,” he wrote in Hillbilly Elegy. This Scots-Irish legacy entailed “many good traits … but also many bad ones. We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or, most importantly, how they talk.”

15.

After graduating from Middletown High School in 2003, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and served in Iraq as a corporal with the Public Affairs section of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. “I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to — that the promises of the foreign policy establishment were a complete joke,” he has said.

16.

He graduated from Ohio State University with a degree in political science and philosophy, before enrolling at Yale Law School in 2010.

17.

While at Yale, he attended a talk by Thiel about technological stagnation and the decline of American elites: “He saw these two trends … as connected,” Vance later recalled of his first encounter with Thiel. “If technological innovation were actually driving real prosperity, our elites wouldn’t feel increasingly competitive with one another over a dwindling number of prestigious outcomes.” Vance has called Thiel’s talk “the most significant moment” of his time at Yale.

18.

Vance began working on a memoir while at Yale at the suggestion of his mentor and Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother author Amy Chua. “I thought the idea that I could write a meaningful book was kind of arrogant and presumptuous. But then I started writing little things here and there,” he has said.

19.

Another significant moment of his time at Yale: meeting Usha Chilukuri, his future wife and the mother of his three children. The couple married in 2014 and held a separate ceremony where they were blessed by a Hindu pundit.

20.

Chilukuri went on to clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and then-D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh. She is now a litigator at the white-shoe firm Munger, Tolles & Olson. “I joked with a buddy that if she had possessed a terrible personality, she would have made an excellent heroine in an Ayn Rand novel, but she had a great sense of humor,” Vance wrote in his memoir. Despite her conservative clerkships, colleagues described her as “liberal or moderate.”

21.

Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy was published on June 28, 2016. The book argued that the decline of post-industrial America was due in large part to the social pathologies of the white working class, rather than the decline of the industrial economy in the U.S. “There is a lack of agency here [in Middletown] — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself,” Vance wrote.

22.

In a review, the New York Times called the book “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion, particularly the ascent of Donald J. Trump.”

23.

The American Conservative praised it as “a powerful new memoir [that] uncovers an America many do not see.”

24.

The New Republic trashed it as “little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class.”

25.

During the 2016 election, Vance emerged as a vocal critic of Donald Trump: “I’m a Never Trump guy,” he told Charlie Rose in October 2016.

26.

“My god what an idiot,” he tweeted about Trump that same month.

27.

“Trump is cultural heroin,” he wrote in a story in The Atlantic. “I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place,” he said on NPR.

28.

“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” he wrote to a friend in February 2016. He ended up voting for independent Evan McMullin.

29.

In 2019, Vance founded his own venture firm, Narya, based in Ohio. Like Thiel’s firm, Palantir, Narya was named after a fictional object from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books.

30.

During the Trump years, Vance says, he came to support Trump’s policies — and was radicalized by liberals’ angry reaction to Trump. “If you even acknowledged that there were reasonable things that Donald Trump was saying, there was this complete overreaction,” he has said.

31.

He was baptized into the Catholic church in August 2019. At the time, he credited his conversion to his exposure — via Thiel — to the writings of the French philosopher René Girard, whom Thiel studied under at Stanford University. Girard is most famous for his theory of “mimetic desire”: that human beings imitate the desires of their peers, ultimately giving rise to rivalries and violent conflicts that are resolved by “scapegoating” a common enemy.

32.

Among his other current intellectual influences, Vance has cited the conservative localist Rod Dreher, the reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin and the “postliberal” Catholic philosopher Patrick Deneen.

33.

“He is thoroughgoingly illiberal in his instincts,” a friend of Vance’s from Yale has said. “I don’t mean it as a slur. I mean it in a technical sense. He is skeptical of the political project of enlightenment liberalism, like, We’re all just autonomous individuals trying to self-actualize and maximize our own interests.”

34.

He voted for Trump in 2020.

35.

In November 2020, one week after the presidential election, Netflix released a film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy, directed by Ron Howard and starring Gabriel Basso as Vance, Glenn Close as Mamaw and Amy Adams as Bev Vance. The movie was widely panned, with the New Yorker calling it “a libertarian’s fantasy.” Friends of Vance have said that the negative reaction to the film was the “last straw” of Vance’s estrangement from elite liberal society.

36.

On July 1, 2021, Vance announced his Senate campaign in Ohio.

37.

“I regret being wrong about the guy,” Vance said about Trump several days later on the campaign trail. “I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.” He later added: “He’s the best president of my lifetime.”

38.

In April 2022, Trump endorsed Vance. “J.D. is kissing my ass he wants my support so bad,” Trump later said.

39.

Vance’s primary supporter inside Trump world was Donald Trump Jr. His most prominent supporter in the conservative media: Tucker Carlson. His biggest donor: Peter Thiel (to the tune of $10 million).

40.

“I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” Mitt Romney told his biographer in 2022, as Vance was running for the Senate.

41.

On Nov. 8, 2022, Vance beat Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan 53 percent to 47 percent, underperforming other state-wide Republicans by 11 points.

42.

In his victory speech, he thanked his Mamaw: “You’re not always going to agree with every vote that I take, and you’re not going to agree with every single amendment that I offer in the United States Senate, but I will never forget the woman who raised me,” he told the audience.

43.

In the Senate, he has emerged as a dogged defender of Trump and the standard-bearer of the “New Right,” a loose movement of young conservatives trying to push the Republican Party in a more populist, nationalist and culturally conservative direction.

44.

His most ambitious legislative initiatives have arisen from partnerships with progressive Democrats: a sweeping railway safety reform bill co-authored by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and an executive pay claw-back provision drafted with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Neither bill has received a vote on the Senate floor.

45.

He is a leading critic of U.S. support for Ukraine. “I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” Vance told Steve Bannon in an interview in 2022.

46.

He has suggested that the Biden administration is allowing fentanyl to cross the Southern border as part of a deliberate strategy to kill Republican voters: “If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl. . . . It does look intentional. It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him.”

47.

In June 2023, he put a hold on all Biden administration appointments to the Justice Department to protest the indictments of Donald Trump. He has called Trump’s hush-money trial in New York a “threat to American democracy.”

48.

He believes that “the culture war is class war” — that pushing back against the cultural values of progressive elites is necessary to advance the economic and political interests of the working class. In the Senate, his culture war initiatives include a bill criminalizing gender-affirming care for transgender kids, a ban on federal mask mandates, and crack-down on affirmative action policies at colleges and universities. He publicly supports a 15-week abortion ban with exceptions for rape, incest and threats to the life of the mother.

49.

He opposes the PRO Act, the “holy grail of pro-union labor reform.”

50.

He has compared the current moment in American history to the end of the Roman Republic. “We are in a late republican period” in America he said on a podcast appearance in 2022. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

51.

He has said that if he had been in Mike Pence’s shoes in 2021, he would not have certified the results of the 2020 election: “If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” he said in February.

52.

He has encouraged Trump to defy the Supreme Court if the justices prevent him from firing executive branch officials.

53.

“He’s by far the smartest and the deepest of any [senator] I’ve ever met,” Tucker Carlson has said.

54.

“I’m sure he’ll run for the presidency one day,” said Bannon.

55.

“Trump will, at most, serve four years in the White House,” Vance has said. “There is a big question about what comes after him.”