Usha Vance Is Adjusting to Life as a Prominent Political Spouse

The night before the biggest assignment of her life, Usha Vance stayed up late with her husband, JD Vance. In their rooms at the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee, they went over each other’s speeches to the Republican National Convention.

In keeping with many intellectual and professional endeavors over the course of their relationship, which got its start at Yale Law School more than a decade ago, they approached the task as a couple.

Their lives were about to undergo a dramatic change. Two days earlier, former President Donald Trump had announced the selection of Vance as his running mate on the Republican presidential ticket. Vance was used to the spotlight, having made his name as the bestselling author of the memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” years before he was elected to the Senate in 2022, but his wife had remained largely a private figure.

Standing before an audience of more than 17,000, with millions more watching on television, Usha Vance delivered a speech that was direct and conversational, without the theatrical bluster employed by many of her fellow convention speakers.

“When I was asked to introduce my husband, JD Vance, to all of you, I was at a loss," she began. “What could I say that hasn’t already been said before? After all, the man was already the subject of a Ron Howard movie.”

With that line, a reference to the Oscar-nominated film based on her husband’s book, she earned her first laugh, and any jitters she might have had seemed to disappear.

Those who know her said they had never had any doubt that she would bring it at the convention. After all, Usha Vance is used to acing tests.

“She’s never gotten a B her entire life,” said Dan Driscoll, a family friend and fellow Yale Law School graduate who is serving as a campaign adviser to JD Vance.

Since childhood, Usha Vance, a daughter of Indian immigrants who grew up in a middle-class neighborhood of San Diego, has experienced an unbroken sequence of successes in elite academic and professional institutions, including Yale College, the University of Cambridge, Yale Law School and the Supreme Court, where she served as a clerk. It is the resume of someone destined to reach the pinnacle of American achievement. So, in that sense, her elevation to a marquee stage in national politics is unsurprising.

But the fact that she delivered her speech to a party now dominated by Trump’s combative brand of politics is perhaps less likely. A cerebral person, Usha Vance chooses her words carefully, and friends describe her as apolitical. Her speech did not contain the words “Trump” or “Republican.”

In 2006, when she was a junior at Yale College, Vance — then Usha Chilukuri — was featured as one of the university’s “50 most beautiful” students by a campus magazine. The article characterized her views as “of the leftish political persuasion” while noting that her romantic partners did not necessarily share her ideology.

In the fall of 2010, at Yale Law School, she found herself in a group for first-year students with JD Vance, a military veteran who was then, as she put it in her convention speech, “fresh out of Ohio State, which he attended with the support of the GI Bill.”

Their differences were immediately apparent. Usha Vance was raised by a mechanical engineer and a biologist in a tight-knit community of families who had immigrated from India. JD Vance had a tough childhood in southwestern Ohio, where he was raised mainly by his maternal grandparents.

“Who wouldn’t want to be friends with JD?” Usha Vance said in her speech, going on to describe him as “a working-class guy who had overcome childhood traumas that I could barely fathom to end up at Yale Law School, a tough Marine who had served in Iraq, but whose idea of a good time was playing with puppies and watching the movie ‘Babe.’”

They were married in Kentucky in 2014, with wooden benches for guests set outside in the grass. In a separate ceremony, they were blessed by a Hindu pandit.

Early in their marriage, they moved around a lot, with stops in Columbus, Ohio, Cincinnati and Washington. Usha Vance pursued ever more prestigious clerkships, working under Judge Brett Kavanaugh in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then under Chief Justice John Roberts at the Supreme Court.

In 2015, the Vances moved to San Francisco. Usha Vance started as an associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson, while JD Vance went to work at Mithril Capital, an investment firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, and finished writing “Hillbilly Elegy.” At Munger, which is known for its selectiveness in hiring and its progressive outlook, Usha Vance worked as a civil litigator representing clients including the Pacific Gas & Electric Co., Disney and the University of California.

JD Vance has described his wife as a key adviser who keeps him humble. “If I get a little too cocky or a little too proud, I just remind myself that she’s way more accomplished than I,” he told Megyn Kelly in an interview in 2020. “I’m one of those guys who really benefits from having sort of a powerful female voice over his left shoulder saying, ‘Don’t do that, do that.’”

Around 2018, the Vances moved to a diverse neighborhood on the east side of Cincinnati, where they own a 5,000-square-foot Victorian Gothic house. Usha Vance joined the board of the city’s symphony orchestra at the urging of Rob McDonald, who befriended the couple after he had met JD Vance when trying to recruit him to the law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister.

In an interview for this story, McDonald said that Usha Vance’s background in intellectual property law had been an asset as the symphony figured out how to make its music available for streaming. (She left the board last year, at the end of her three-year term.)

Since JD Vance’s election to the Senate in 2022, the family has toggled between northern Virginia and Cincinnati.

For most of her adult life, Usha Vance’s friends and colleagues have understood her to be a liberal or a centrist. She was registered as a Democrat as recently as 2014 and kept liberal and leftist circles during a fellowship at Cambridge. Colleagues at Munger, Tolles & Olson — a firm described in a 2019 American Lawyer article as “cool” and “woke” — remember her as a moderate.

Still, Usha Vance’s beliefs remain a matter of speculation, and she did not comment for this story. Roberts and Kavanaugh, for whom she served as a clerk, are legal conservatives. And Usha Vance’s friends and colleagues said she rarely discussed politics, and never in a partisan way. But as her husband’s politics have changed, she has been there to support him.

Usha Vance’s unflagging support of her husband during his political evolution has put her, from the outside at least, in a tense position: endorsing a political ideology that targets the elite institutions that helped shape her.

Friends say they expect Usha Vance, already laser focused on her family, to spend even more time with her children between now and the election. Indeed, on the day of her convention speech, she resigned from her job at Munger, Tolles & Olson.

But she has the skills to go out on the stump, according to Jai Chabria, an Ohio political consultant who served as chief strategist for JD Vance’s Senate campaign.

Usha Vance did not hit the trail very often in the 2022 Senate race, he said, because she had just given birth to the couple’s third child — but when she did go out before the public, she rose to the occasion.

“Every time voters met her or were able to see her, it was a ‘wow,’” Chabria said. “There is this quiet confidence with her. I think people are drawn to it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .