JD Vance

August 2, 1984

American politician and author, the 50th vice president of the United States since 2025 and a former U.S. senator from Ohio. He became known for his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

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Biography

JD Vance was born in 1984 and grew up in Middletown, Ohio, in a poor and unstable household. After high school he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 2003 and served as a military journalist until 2007, including a six-month non-combat deployment to Iraq in 2005. He then took a political science and philosophy degree at Ohio State University, graduating in 2009, and earned a law degree from Yale Law School in 2013.

After a federal court clerkship and a short spell as a corporate lawyer at Sidley Austin, he moved into venture capital, working at Peter Thiel's Mithril Capital and then at Steve Case's Revolution, and in 2019 co-founded Narya Capital in Cincinnati. His 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, about the white working class of Appalachia and the Rust Belt, made him nationally known and was filmed in 2020.

First a critic of Donald Trump, Vance became a supporter during his run for the U.S. Senate and won Ohio's seat in 2022, beating Democrat Tim Ryan. Trump chose him as his running mate in July 2024; after their victory he resigned from the Senate and became vice president in January 2025, the first Marine Corps veteran, Iraq War veteran and millennial in that office. He is associated with national conservatism and the populist New Right.