Although James David Vance is now an Ohio Senator, the 2024 Republican candidate for Vice President, a famous American author, venture capitalist, lawyer, and former United States Marine, his childhood was filled with struggles.
JD Vance was born on August 2, 1984, to parents Beverly Carol and James Donald Bowman in Middletown, Ohio. He gets his Scots-Irish ethnicity from his parents. Vance does not go by his birth name, James Donald Bowman, who was named after his father.
Husband to wife Usha Vance, JD Vance first rose to prominence when he released his book Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, a memoir reflecting on his family and the culture he grew up around.
His book is now a major motion picture on Netflix, directed by Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard and starring Hollywood A-listers Amy Adams and Glenn Close.
JD Vance once went by his stepfather’s surname; his current surname comes from his grandfather!
JD Vance parents divorced when he was a toddler, and his mother’s second husband adopted him soon after the divorce. For a while, he went by the name James Hamel as he took his stepfather’s surname.
His mother struggled with drug addiction during his childhood, which plunged his family into poverty and rendered him a victim of his mother’s abuse.
Such dire circumstances led Vance and his sister Lindsey to grow up mainly in the care of their maternal grandparents, James and Bonnie Vance. So, JD Vance later adopted his grandparents’ surname and went by it for the rest of his life.
After graduating high school in 2003, Vance enlisted in the Marine Corps and worked as a combat correspondent during his 2005 deployment to Iran.
According to Vance, he developed a sense of purpose for the first time when he started working at the Public Affairs section of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. In Hillbilly Elegy, he even dubs this period the “defining chapter of his life.”
He met Usha Chilukuri during his law school years at Yale and married her in 2014.
Vance, who called himself an atheist prior to meeting Usha, has since publicly stated that his wife’s Hindu faith has helped him a great deal in navigating his own spiritual and political journey. He and Usha have three children together: Ewan, 6, Vivek, 4, and Mirabel, 2.
A versatile man with a career in politics, advocacy, writing, and business, Vance was initially against Trump’s candidacy in 2016!
After graduating from law school, JD Vance worked at various places, including under Senator John Cornyn and as a law clerk.
He even moved to San Francisco in 2016 to pursue a career in venture capitalism and worked at Mithril Capital as the principal from 2016 to 2017.
His book, Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir about his upbringing in the Rust Belt and Appalachian culture, garnered significant attention during the 2016 Presidential election campaign.
Vance’s position as the Republican Party’s candidate for the 2024 Vice-Presidency (and ipso facto the running mate of 2024’s Republican Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump) was announced on July 15, 2024.
Surprisingly, during Trump’s first run for office in 2016, Vance was against his candidacy!
Currently, Vance echoes many of the Republican party’s core values: he is against same-sex marriage, supports the 15-week abortion ban except for rape and incest, and has even voiced his stance against the USA’s military aid to Ukraine.
Additional Information
- Vance is the first-ever millennial candidate for Vice-President, while also being the first one to have served in the Marine Corps.
- His book Hillbilly Elegy became a finalist for the 2016 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The New York Times called it ‘one of the six best books to help understand Trump’s win.’
