How JD Vance’s Difficult Childhood Shaped His Life and Political Career (2024)

1984-present

U.S. Senator JD Vance has represented Ohio since 2023 and is the 2024 Republican vice presidential nominee alongside presidential candidate Donald Trump. Vance served in the U.S. Marine Corps prior to his graduation from Yale Law School in 2013 then worked as a corporate lawyer and venture capitalist. He is also the author of the best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which was adapted into a 2020 movie starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close.

FULL NAME: James David Vance
BORN: August 2, 1984
BIRTHPLACE: Middletown, Ohio
SPOUSE: Usha Vance (2014-present)
CHILDREN: Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Leo

JD Vance was born James Donald Bowman on August 2, 1984, in Middletown, Ohio, to his mother, Beverly Vance, and father, Donald Bowman.

JD grew up alongside his older half-sister, Lindsay Lewis Ratliff, whom Beverly gave birth to at age 19. He also has had a number of step-siblings, though he has said it was difficult to quantify the actual number of his siblings. “I had many stepbrothers and stepsisters by one measure, but only two if you limited the tally to the offspring of Mom’s husband of the moment,” Vance wrote in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy. “By some metrics, I probably had about a dozen stepsiblings.”

When JD was a young child, his mother and father divorced. Beverly remarried a man named Bob Hamel, and Bowman stopped claiming JD as his son. “Dad gave me up for adoption when I was 6. After the adoption, he became kind of a phantom for the next six years,” Vance wrote. “I had few memories of life with him.”

Beverly legally changed her son’s name to James David Hamel to “erase any memory” of Bowman and preserve JD’s initial-based moniker. Father and son eventually reconnected during JD’s teenage years. Bowman died in 2023.

Meanwhile, Beverly, a nurse, began abusing prescription medications and battled a heroin addiction. She eventually split from Hamel, and her interactions with JD grew increasingly erratic. JD said this culminated in a scary incident when he was 12, in which she threatened to purposely crash her speeding car and kill them both. Police arrested Beverly after the encounter, and JD went to live with his maternal grandparents, Bonnie and James Vance. JD called them “Mamaw” and “Papaw” and took on their last name, officially becoming JD Vance.

Beverly is now 10 years sober and attended JD’s speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention.

Vance graduated from Middletown High School in 2003 and joined the U.S. Marine Corps. “I did so, in part, because I wasn’t ready for adulthood,” Vance wrote in his memoir. “I didn’t know how to balance a checkbook, much less how to complete the financial aid forms for college.”

According to his service record, Vance enlisted as a combat correspondent, or military journalist, and served from 2003 through 2007. He deployed for a six-month tour in Iraq beginning in late 2005. Vance earned a Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal and a Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal during his service.

Having matured in the Marines, Vance enrolled at Ohio State University and graduated in 2009 with a degree in political science and philosophy. He immediately transitioned to Yale Law School, where he struggled to fit in.

A fellow Yale attendee told the Washington Post that Vance formed a small group of friends with other politically moderate or conservative students. They held movie nights, competed in fantasy football, and played darts at a nearby bar. Still, Vance felt like a “cultural alien.”

Despite this, Vance completed his studies and graduated in 2013, kicking off his professional career. After Yale, Vance served as a clerk for U.S. District Judge David Bunning and, according to Time, worked at the Sidley Austin LLP law firm. But he didn’t stay in the legal world for long.

In 2016, he lived in San Francisco and began working as a venture capitalist at Mithril Capital, the firm co-started by American billionaire Peter Thiel. Three years later, in 2019, Vance co-founded a firm, Narya Capital, based in Cincinnati.

Also in 2016, Vance founded Our Ohio Renewal, a social welfare organization dedicated to combatting addiction, problems in education, and other “social ills” in the state. But according to NPR, the organization folded within two years.

In June 2016, Vance published the autobiographical memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. The book details his turbulent upbringing, as well as what Vance considers the declining social and economic conditions of the Appalachian region. “I didn’t write this book because I’ve accomplished extraordinary. I wrote this book because I’ve achieved something quite ordinary, which doesn’t happen to most kids who grow up like me,” Vance wrote.

While Hillbilly Elegy drew criticism for its depiction of Appalachia, with Vance suggesting the region’s laziness was a factor in its growing poverty, the book had sold more than 3 million copies as of July 2024. It also accelerated Vance’s political career, turning him into a sought-after commentator for interviews about rural Americans.

Hillbilly Elegy’s movie adaptation, directed by Ron Howard and starring Amy Adams as Beverly Vance and Glenn Close as Mamaw Vance, premiered in November 2020. Critics largely panned the movie, costing $45 million and distributed by Netflix, with the Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey describing it as “a sickeningly irresponsible parade of death and despair.” Despite this, Close received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

Watch Hillbilly Elegy on Netflix

With the announcement of Vance’s vice presidential run in 2024, the book and film surged in popularity. The print version sold more than 650,000 copies in only 10 days, while the movie accumulated almost 5 million views on Netflix in just over one week.

By 2018, Vance began to consider running for public office. The Republican explored a campaign for one of Ohio’s U.S. Senate seats against incumbent Sherrod Brown but ultimately decided against it. Still, it was clear Vance had big political aspirations.

Becoming U.S. Senator for Ohio

Three years later, Vance did enter the Senate race, this time for the Ohio seat vacated by Rob Portman. He beat out a crowded field for the GOP nomination, garnering just over 32 percent of the vote in the May 2022 primary. In the general election that November, Vance underperformed compared to other Ohio Republicans, particularly gubernatorial winner Mike DeWine, but still won the Senate seat by a comfortable six-point margin over Democratic candidate Tim Ryan.

Vance was sworn in on January 3, 2023, in Washington D.C. He became the first Ohio senator without previous political experience since astronaut John Glenn in 1974. “I hope that with this position, I can lend my voice to the millions of working- and middle-class Ohioans who have been left behind by decades of failed leadership,” Vance said at the time.

In Congress, Vance has maintained an active profile. According to data from July 2024, he has spoken 45 times on the Senate floor and sponsored 57 bills, though none of them have yet passed the Senate. Vance is also a member of three Senate Committees: Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs; Commerce, Science, and Transportation; and the Special Committee on Aging.

2024 Vice Presidential Nominee

Once critical of Donald Trump, whom he called “cultural heroin” in 2016 and likened to Adolf Hitler, Vance has become one of the former president’s biggest supporters. He has said he aligns with Trump on a number of policy issues, such as letting states determine their own abortion rights and favoring tariffs. Vance’s change in allegiance, which culminated with an endorsem*nt of Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, proved greatly beneficial to his own political profile.

In July 2024, Trump selected the freshman senator as his vice presidential running mate on the GOP ticket. Vance officially accepted the nomination at the Republican National Convention held later that month in Milwaukee. “Never in my wildest imagination could I have believed that I’d be standing here tonight,” said Vance, who attempted to appeal to voters in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan during his speech.

Pundits have questioned the effectiveness of Vance’s selection. Polls showed he was the first non-incumbent vice presidential candidate since 1980 to have a net-negative favorability rating after his party’s convention. Additionally, Vance drew controversy for previous comments during a pair of 2021 interviews in which he called Democratic Party members “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives” and suggested Americans without children should be taxed at a higher rate.

While attending Yale Law School, Vance met fellow student Usha Chilukuri, a Californian raised by Indian immigrants. The pair connected over a class assignment, with Vance later admitting he “fell hard” for his partner. “In a place that always seemed a little foreign, Usha’s presence made me feel at home,” he wrote in Hillbilly Elegy.

Vance and Chilukuri graduated in 2013 and married the following year. They have three children: sons Ewan and Vivek and a daughter, Mirabel.

Usha, who is two years younger than JD, worked as a clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, when he served as an appeals court judge in Washington D.C. She then became a trial lawyer for the Munger, Tolles, and Olson LLP law firm but left following Vance’s selection as the vice presidential nominee.

Vance said white supremacists have “attacked” the couple over Usha’s Indian heritage but that he loves her “because she’s who she is.” “She’s such a good mom. She’s such a brilliant lawyer, and I’m so proud of her,” he told Megyn Kelly in July 2024.

Celebrity Net Worth estimates Vance has a total fortune around $5 million as of August 2024, while Forbes has reported the politician holds an asset portfolio worth as much as $10 million.

According to his financial disclosures, Vance earned more than $800,000 in royalties from publisher HarperCollins for Hillbilly Elegy across 2020 and 2021.

• One of the really deep beliefs I have is that there are all of these small little miracles, and if you look for them, you actually see them.
• Despite all outward appearances, I’m a cultural outsider. I didn’t come from the elites. I didn’t come from the Northeast, or from San Francisco. I came from a southern Ohio steel town.
• I pledge to every American, no matter your party, I will give you everything I have, to serve you and to make this country a place where every dream you have for yourself, your family, and your country can be possible once again.
• What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives.

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