In J.D. Vance, Trump is going all in on populism — and elevating an heir apparent

Donald Trump had lined up safer choices. Instead, he picked a flamethrower as a running mate.

In J.D. Vance, Trump selected the most ideological, pugilistic Republican on his shortlist for vice president — someone who could help him attract blue-collar and Rust Belt voters, but whose comments on abortion could alienate some moderate suburbanites and women.

Trump placed a bet on both the appeal of their shared populism and the promise of generational change — elevating a 39-year-old freshman senator from Ohio as the MAGA movement’s heir apparent. The selection will draw a contrast not only with the 81-year-old Biden, whose age has become a major point of weakness in his campaign, but also Vice President Kamala Harris, who — while young in Washington terms — is a full decade older than Vance.

Vance brings Trump a lot: His youth, his TV savvy and his ability to tap into a Silicon Valley donor base that has, until recently, been wary of the Republican Party. But most important, Republicans say, are the connections they believe he can make with blue-collar voters in some of the most coveted swing states.

“It makes sure that the Blue Wall stays flattened,” said Charlie Gerow, a Pennsylvania-based Republican strategist. “The sweep across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin is now solid.”

Trump himself noted the appeal he thought Vance might have in the Rust Belt and upper Midwest when he announced his selection on Truth Social, writing that Vance “will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond.”

Republicans are expecting him to become a fixture in the campaign. Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, predicted Vance would appeal to “lunch bucket Democrats,” meaning the “blue-collar parts of our country that are yearning for a leader who can understand the challenges they face.”

“I have watched him behind the scenes,” Daines said of Vance’s two years in the Senate, praising his colleague as “engaging.” “He’s not afraid to be vocal … He jumped right in,” he added.

But comments made in recent years by Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, will almost certainly be used against him as Democrats work to make a dent into Trump’s lead in swing states.

On an issue that is one of Republicans’ top vulnerabilities, Vance last year referred to abortion as “murder,” and during his Senate race in 2022 said he would vote for a national 15-week abortion limit. During that same campaign, Vance expressed reservations about abortion exceptions for rape and incest and defended a law in Texas that did not include any.

“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,” Vance said at the time.

Vance later said he supports “reasonable exceptions.” He was involved in the Republican-led campaign last year against Ohio’s constitutional amendment, which ultimately passed and guaranteed a right to an abortion. In recent weeks, he has praised Trump’s plan to leave abortion laws to the states, and said he stood behind Trump’s support of access to the mifepristone abortion pill.

But it isn’t just abortion. Vance faced criticism during his Senate run after he questioned the prevalence of divorce, saying “one of the great tricks” of the “sexual revolution” is that people in violent and unhappy marriages can “shift spouses like they change their underwear” to attain happiness.

His campaign at the time disputed that he was calling for people to stay in abusive relationships, calling the notion “preposterous” and noting that Vance as a child was a victim of domestic abuse.

Democrats pounced on the selection Monday, warning that Vance would back efforts to ban abortion and pointing to his prior support for elements of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposal that Democrats have framed as a blueprint for a second Trump term. Trump has sought to distance himself from the plan.

“Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6; bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, who chairs President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, said in a statement.

The selection, in some ways, puts a bow on The choice of Vance puts a bow on Trump’s eight-year transformation of the Republican Party.

Vance’s best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” his personal story about the plight of the white working class, caught the zeitgeist of 2016, when Trump cannonballed into the Republican Party. But while his experience growing up poor in Kentucky and Ohio helped explain the grievances that fueled Trump’s political rise, he did not always support the former president.

In 2017, Vance wrote in a social media post he later deleted, “In 4 years, I hope people remember that it was those of us who empathized with Trump’s voters who fought him most aggressively.”

But after winning Trump’s endorsement in his Senate race, Vance not only became a vocal defender of the former president in Washington, but also embraced many of his priorities, including on border security, China and Trump’s baseless attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

“He's very cerebral,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “He's obviously very well educated. If I had to pick one word to describe J.D., it would probably be ‘sagacious.’ He's thoughtful, he's deliberate, he's calm. He carefully thinks about his positions and makes sure he can defend them.”

Drew Griffin, a former chief of staff for Rep. Bob Latta of Ohio who works for Invariant, said Vance “checks several boxes for the Trump campaign in terms of loyalty, the ability to sell the ticket, his specific appeal to Midwestern swing states, and his youth.”

Even Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, at times a Trump critic who said he disagrees with Vance on some issues — such as the senator’s opposition to Ukraine aid — offered relatively positive comments about the decision.

“What he's done is he has really articulated, basically, the Donald Trump platform and has done it in a very articulate way,” DeWine said from the Milwaukee convention hall.

“He's younger. He has very different life experiences than President Trump does, I think that's significant. But if you look at their positions, he's taken someone who is close to him."

In choosing Vance, Trump passed over less polarizing figures, including North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. The latter presented a residency challenge. The Constitution forbids electoral college voters from backing a ticket of two candidates from their own state, and Rubio would have had to establish residency elsewhere. People familiar with the conversations in recent days, granted anonymity to speak about private talks, said that they didn’t want to risk prolonged potential legal challenges.

And despite eleventh-hour speculation in some Republican circles on Monday that Trump was going to surprise observers by tapping Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who was not on his shortlist, that was never the case.

Youngkin had not submitted any vetting materials to Trump’s team, according to a person with knowledge of the process.

Lisa Kashinsky and Adam Cancryn contributed to this report.