Donald Trump’s selection of Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate on Monday elevated the longtime finance veteran to a key role that’s sure to play a key role in the remainder of the 2024 campaign.
And if Trump wins in November, Vance will instantly become a key conduit to a broad cross-section of the business world, from Silicon Valley powerhouses to the manufacturing industries he has supported as a venture capitalist and senator.
“I have determined that the person best qualified to serve as Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio,” Trump wrote on social media.
“JD has had a very successful business career in technology and finance,” the former president added.
Vance, 39, is a longtime venture capitalist with a more business than political career.
It was during this early stage of his career that Vance built the connections that would shape his political career.
Those connections first helped Trump bring investor money to his home state of Ohio, then helped him raise money for his Senate campaign and have already helped shore up Trump’s own campaign coffers.
Vance has repeatedly demonstrated that he can navigate the business world while maintaining his public identity as a man from a poor Ohio childhood who describes himself as “country at heart.”
“I sometimes view the elites with an almost primitive contempt,” he wrote in his best-selling memoir, adding that what’s most frustrating is that these elites “are beating us at our own game.”
Living in San Francisco
After graduating from Yale Law School in 2013, Vance lived in San Francisco and worked for Mithril Capital, a firm co-founded by former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel and Ajay Loyan, both longtime big Republican donors.
Vance also spent time early in his career in the Washington, D.C. area, working at former AOL CEO Steve Case’s venture capital firm, Revolution LLC, on projects to expand capital opportunities to towns such as Vance’s hometown of Middletown, Ohio.
“J.D. Vance is the perfect person to help expand Rise of the Rest because he has become a voice for people across the country who feel left behind,” Case said in 2017.
It was during this time that Vance published his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis,” which became a New York Times bestseller and catapulted him to national fame.
In his book, Vance describes himself as an ordinary guy who shops at a Walmart near Washington, D.C., and has “a good job, a happy marriage, a comfortable home, and two healthy dogs.”
The book also notes that Vance returned to his native Ohio, continued working in venture capital, and settled in the Cincinnati area.
He launched his own fund in 2020, reportedly backed by Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Eric Schmidt and Scott Dorsey. The Cincinnati-based firm, Nalia Capital, was created to help direct big East Coast dollars to investment opportunities in states like Ohio.
Vance later entered politics, running for Senate in 2022, where his tech connections helped him again.
Thiel has donated $5 million to support Vance’s upcoming 2022 U.S. Senate campaign through donations to a group aligned with Vance called Protecting Ohio Values, according to federal election records.
Vance won that election and was elected to the Senate in 2023, a position he still holds today.
Thiel has not yet been involved in the 2024 election, but Vance is also close to David Sachs, the billionaire investor who has become a key supporter of Trump.
Vance and Sachs helped organize a recent fundraiser for Trump in Silicon Valley. The event, held at Sachs’ home, marked Trump’s first visit to San Francisco in several years. The foray into the deep blue region reportedly raised $12 million for the Trump campaign.
“We have in this room some of the leading innovators in the field of AI,” Vance said during an appearance on Fox News after the fundraiser.
Sachs is also scheduled to speak at the Republican National Convention on Monday night.
From Trump critic to insider
Vance’s time in San Francisco coincided with a period of fierce criticism of Trump, a rhetoric that Democrats are likely to continue to make in the coming months.
In a 2016 essay for The Atlantic, he spoke about the drug problem in his home state of Ohio and argued that Trump was not the solution to the problems in Middletown, Ohio.
He ended by calling Trump a “cultural heroin.”
This is just one in a long list of Vance’s past anti-Trump stances that have been well-documented during his rise in national politics.
Vance has distanced himself from his earlier harsh comments and has since become one of Trump’s most outspoken defenders.
Following the recent assassination attempt on the former president, Vance went further than most, blaming President Joe Biden for the shooting.
“Those comments led directly to the assassination attempt on President Trump,” he said. Post to X.
His ties to Silicon Valley remain active, and in a second Trump administration, Vance would undoubtedly be a leading voice on big tech policy and other business issues.
Like Trump, Vance has often focused on what he calls Big Tech’s censorship of conservative voices, making it a theme of his time in Washington.
Since returning to Washington as a senator, Vance has also been involved in economic issues that directly affect his home state of Ohio.
For one thing, Vance worked bipartisan with Democrat Sherrod Brown to craft the Rail Safety Act of 2023, a bill aimed at preventing future train accidents after the Norfolk Southern Railroad derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
This is part of his focus on Ohio and building factories during his time as a senator.
During a recent appearance on Fox News, Vance was asked what a “J.D. Vance economy” would look like.
“There are a lot more manufacturing jobs out there than we have today,” he said. “If you look at the economies that are really thriving, they have a strong manufacturing base. They develop their own energy.”
Ben Warschle is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
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