Indian-American lawyer Usha Chirukuri Vance has been gaining attention after her husband, J.D. Vance, was selected by former President Donald Trump as his running mate for the 2024 presidential election. Born and raised in San Diego, California, to Indian immigrant parents, Usha married Vance in 2014. The couple met at Yale Law School in Connecticut.
Usha was born and raised in San Diego, California, to Indian immigrant parents, and married Vance in 2014. She was a practicing lawyer specializing in litigation and worked for the law firm Munger, Torres & Olson. According to ABC News, Usha resigned from her position after Vance announced his candidacy for vice president on July 16.
Notably, Usha clerked for current US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was an Appeals Court Judge. US judicial clerks are full-time assistants to judges. They conduct legal research, draft memoranda and court opinions, proofread, check citations, etc. It may be recalled that in 2018, Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault by a total of four women, one of whom later recanted her allegations.
“I don’t think people really understand how hard he’s had to work,” Usha said of her husband. [JD Vance] “You can see how great his work is and how creative he is in his words and actions. Everything he says and does is based on very deep thought,” she said. During the interview, she also opened up about her own religious identity and Vance’s Christian faith, saying, “I grew up in a religious home. My parents were Hindu, and I think that made them very good parents. They were very good people. So I’ve seen the power of that in my life.” Usha said this in response to being asked why she has supported Vance, despite him having struggled with his Christian faith in the past.
Usha’s Hindu identity could perhaps be seen as an attempt to consolidate support for Trump among Indian-American voters who support the BJP’s Hindu-majority politics in India, where Trump remains popular. However, it is interesting to note that during her Gates Fellowship at Cambridge, Usha “worked primarily among liberals and leftists.”
Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate is seen as a calculated move to win over traditional battleground or “swing” states in the US’s “Rust Belt,” including Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania.
Vance’s victory in the 2016 presidential election was secured by strong support from white working-class voters in the region, a key industrial region of the US, and he himself rose to fame the same year with the publication of his book, “The 1000.” Hillbilly Elegy He describes his “blue-collar” upbringing and how it influenced his political views.
But we should also remember that the rhetoric and actions of Trump and his Midwestern base in particular have been racist and xenophobic, and appealed almost exclusively to the concerns of working-class white people.
Interestingly, when Vance was in , he said, “Trump supporters are certainly more racist than the average white professional, but I don’t believe this is the 1950s. There is a degree of racial resentment, but that’s combined with economic anxiety and a willingness to believe in Trump and many of the things he says, despite the evidence that many of them are not true. I’m really worried that this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.” The interview itself was titled, “What’s Happening to White America?”
US political analysts believe that Trump’s election results depend on the votes of the Midwest and its battleground states. A paper by the London School of Economics noted that Ohio was once considered a “quintessential swing state.” In 2004, it was “the most battleground state,” with then-presidential candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry visiting the state 41 times and “spending tens of millions of dollars to win the state’s 20 electoral votes,” he noted. In 2008, Barack Obama and John McCain visited the state 50 times again, spending about $50 million on advertising. However, in both 2016 and 2020, Ohio became a Republican stronghold. It is now widely considered a safe state for the party.
Meanwhile, pollsters predict that Biden must win Pennsylvania, another key battleground state, to have any hope of reelection, where Trump is leading in the polls and was in the state for a rally earlier this month. Biden won Pennsylvania by a slim margin in 2020, 50.01% to Trump’s 48.84%. Meanwhile, Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 with 48.18% of the vote to Hillary Clinton’s 47.46%.
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