Donald Trump’s selection of Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate on Monday elevates a figure with long-standing financial connections who will surely play a role in the remainder of the 2024 campaign.
And if Trump wins in November, Vance will immediately become a key liaison to a wide range of business sectors — from the powerful reaches of Silicon Valley to the manufacturers he championed both as a venture capitalist and as a senator.
“I have decided that the person best suited to serve as Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the State 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, worked for years as a venture capitalist and has spent most of his career in business rather than politics.
It was in this early phase of his career that Vance made connections that would shape his political career.
Those contacts first helped him bring investor money to his home state of Ohio. They later helped fund his Senate campaign and have helped Trump fill his own campaign coffers.
Vance has proven time and again that he can navigate a variety of business worlds while maintaining a public identity rooted in his childhood growing up in poverty in Ohio as a self-described “gentle-hearted country boy.”
“Sometimes I look at members of the elite with almost primitive scorn,” he wrote in his best-selling memoir, adding that what seemed to frustrate him most was that this elite was “beating us at our own damn game.”
Time living in San Francisco
After graduating from Yale Law School in 2013, Vance spent time living in San Francisco where he worked at Mithril Capital. The firm was co-founded by Peter Thiel, the former PayPal CEO and longtime major Republican donor, and Ajay Royan.
Vance also spent time early in his career in the Washington, D.C. area, where he worked for former AOL CEO Steve Case’s venture capital firm Revolution LLC on a project to expand capital opportunities to cities like Middletown, Ohio — where Vance was born.
“JD Vance has been a leading voice for people across the country who feel left behind, so he is the perfect person to help us develop Rise Of The Rest,” Case said in 2017.
It was also during this era that Vance, in 2016, published a memoir entitled “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” which became a New York Times bestseller and catapulted his name to national prominence.
Vance describes himself in the book as an ordinary, undistinguished person who shops at Walmart in the Washington DC area and has “a good job, a happy marriage, a comfortable home, and two lively dogs.”
The book also describes Vance’s return to his home state of Ohio, where he continued to work in venture capital and settled in the Cincinnati area.
He launched his own fund in 2020, reportedly backed by figures like Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Eric Schmidt, and Scott Dorsey. The Cincinnati-based firm — Narya Capital — was created to help shift big money away from the East Coast and toward investment opportunities in states like Ohio.
Vance then entered politics and ran for Senate in 2022, where his tech contacts continued to come in handy.
Thiel donated $5 million to support Vance’s 2022 Senate run, through donations to a Vance-aligned group called Protect Ohio Values, according to federal election records.
Vance won that race and entered the Senate in 2023, where he continues to serve today.
Thiel has so far not run in the 2024 election, but Vance is also close to billionaire investor David Sacks, who has been a major Trump supporter.
Vance and Sacks helped organize Trump’s latest Silicon Valley fundraiser. The event, held at Sacks’ home, marked Trump’s first visit to San Francisco in years. The fundraising effort in the heavily Democratic area reportedly raised $12 million for Trump’s campaign.
“They are some of the leading innovators in the AI space who are in the room,” Vance said during an appearance on Fox News after the fundraiser.
Sacks will also speak at the Republican National Convention Monday night.
Evolution from Trump critic to insider
Vance’s time in San Francisco also coincided with his time as a vocal critic of Trump, comments Democrats are sure to continue to make in the coming months.
In a 2016 Atlantic essay, he spoke about the drug problem in his home state of Ohio and argued that Trump was not the answer to the problems in Middletown, Ohio.
He ended by calling Trump a “cultural heroin.”
It’s just one of a long list of past anti-Trump stances from Vance that have been well-documented during his rise in national politics.
Vance has long distanced himself from his incendiary comments and has become one of Trump’s most vocal defenders in subsequent years.
In recent days, following the assassination attempt on the former president, Vance has gone further than most and linked the shooting to President Joe Biden’s rhetoric.
“The rhetoric directly leads to an assassination attempt on President Trump,” he said. posted on X.
His ties to Silicon Valley remain active and are sure to make Vance a key figure on Big Tech policy and other business issues in a second Trump administration.
Vance has often — like Trump — focused on what he calls Big Tech’s censorship of conservative voices and has made it a theme during his time in Washington.
Vance has also been involved in economic issues directly related to his home state of Ohio since he came (back) to Washington as a senator.
In one example, Vance teamed up with Democrat Sherrod Brown on the Railroad Safety Act of 2023. The bill aims to prevent future train disasters after a Norfolk Southern (NSC) train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio.
It was part of a focus on Ohio and manufacturing that marked his time in the Senate.
In a recent appearance on Fox News, Vance was asked what a “J.D. Vance economy” would look like.
“There are far more manufacturing jobs than we have today,” he said. “If you look at the economies that are really thriving, they have a strong manufacturing foundation. They are developing their own energy.”
Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
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