Former President Donald Trump has selected as his running mate first-term Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, who has opposed abortion rights and some LGBTQ+ rights in his time in political office.
Vance, 39, a Yale Law School graduate and former venture capitalist, entered the political arena with his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” The book, which chronicled his childhood and upbringing shaped by poverty and addiction in Southwestern Ohio, became a bestseller and guide to many for understanding Trump voters.
Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022. By then, he had transformed from a Trump critic in the 2016 election to a strong Trump supporter, fully embracing Trump’s brand of populist politics and positioning himself as the vanguard of an ultraconservative intellectual movement. He has stood against abortion rights and some LGBTQ+ rights measures while supporting policies he argues would increase birth rates in the United States, such as making childbirth free and financially incentivizing couples to have children. Vance and his wife, Usha Vance , a lawyer he met at Yale, have three children.
Vance, who ran as staunchly anti-abortion in his Senate campaign and in 2021 compared abortion to slavery, has somewhat shifted his public stance on the issue. Trump has reportedly viewed a hardline stance on abortion as a negative for a running mate.
On the campaign trail in 2021, Vance defended the lack of exceptions for rape and incest in a Texas abortion ban known as S.B. 8, saying in an interview that “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society,” he said
In a 2022 Senate debate, however, Vance said he supported “reasonable exceptions” to abortion bans. He was still broadly against access, however, saying he would be “totally fine” with a “minimum national standard” on abortion laws. He also campaigned against a constitutional amendment in Ohio that guarantees a right to abortion and other forms of reproductive health care in the state. In a post on X, Vance described the amendment’s passage in November 2023 as a “gut punch” and said conservatives needed to regain trust on the issue of abortion — including by supporting exceptions.
“I am as pro life as anyone, and I want to save as many babies as possible. This is not about moral legitimacy but political reality,” he wrote.
Vance has praised the policies of Hungary’s far-right leader Viktor Orbán that incentivize families to have children, and he has expressed support for proposals to make childbirth free .
In June, Vance voted against a Democratic-led bill to enshrine access to in vitro fertilization (IVF).
And this month, in response to a Supreme Court ruling that was a defeat for anti-abortion activists, he invoked Trump’s stance. Vance said in a July 7 interview on NBC’s “Meet The Press ” that he agreed with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling dismissing a case challenging the availability of mifepristone, an abortion drug.
“I think it’s important to say that we need to have a conversation in our country about what our abortion policy should be,” he said. “Donald Trump is the pragmatic leader here.”
In a brief comment to reporters at Joint Base Andrews on Monday, President Joe Biden called Vance “a clone of Trump on the issues.”
Jen O’Malley Dillon, co-chair of Biden’s reelection campaign, said on a Monday call with reporters that Vance would “bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda” and “wants to take women back decades.”
“With Trump and Vance now entering the general election, they’re facing off against the Biden-Harris ticket, and I will certainly take that matchup any day of the week and twice on Sunday,” she said. “While Trump and Vance have an agenda focused on themselves and their wealthy donor friends, President Biden and Vice President Harris are fighting for the American people.”
The Biden campaign also said that Harris accepted CBS News’ invitation to participate in a yet-to-be-scheduled vice presidential debate.
“The VP will take it to JD Vance,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said on the Monday call. “I’ve known her for 15 years, she’s been in every kind of fight on behalf of working families. And she is strong. She knows what she’s talking about and she doesn’t give an inch.”
Vance has criticized Harris before, as part of comments taking aim at prominent Democrats who do not have children. He has argued that political leaders should have a stake in the country’s future through their children.
In a July 2021 speech to a conservative think tank and subsequent interview with Fox News , he criticized “the childless left,” saying, “Why have we let the Democrat Party become controlled by people who don’t have children?”
On both occasions, Vance explicitly called out Harris, Sen. Cory Booker, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Harris has two stepchildren and Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten welcomed twins in September 2021.
“We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” Vance said in a 2021 interview with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
“If we want a healthy ruling class in this country, we should invest more, we should vote more, we should support people who actually have kids, because those are the people who actually have a direct stake in the future of the country,” Vance added.
Vance also attacked economist and New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman as “one of many weird cat ladies who have too much power in our country” in a July 2021 tweet and in a September 2021 tweet quipped: “These cat ladies, man. They must be stopped.”
In June 2022, two days after the Supreme Court ended a federal right to abortion, he tweeted: “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”
While running for Senate, Vance said he would have voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, a bipartisan bill that overturned the Defense of Marriage Act and required states to recognize same-sex marriages from other states.
Vance has also criticized gender-affirming care and in 2023, introduced legislation to criminalize certain forms of gender-affirming care, including surgery, for minors.
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