The youngest VP nominee in decades could continue Trump’s legacy for years.
former President Donald Trump announced Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio will be his running mate in the 2024 presidential election. Vance’s selection presents the American people with a far younger face in a race that has been defined in part by the advanced age of President Joe Biden (81 years old) and Trump (78), and is also symbolic of the GOP’s transition to a more Trumpian form of conservatism.
Vance’s own political evolution reflects Trump’s capture and gradual reshaping of the Republican Party over the past decade. Vance rose to prominence with his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which attracted attention for its unvarnished picture of the encounters Vance and his family had with unemployment, poverty and substance abuse, as well as Vance’s eventual success attending Yale Law School and working as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.
His memoir offered a deeply personal perspective on the experiences of some working-class Rust Belt and Appalachian communities that came to form a core part of Trump’s base. But while promoting his book, Vance didn’t paint a positive picture of Trump. He told interviewers that he viewed Trump as “a fraud” and tweeted just before the 2016 election that he found Trump “reprehensible,” even saying that he planned to vote for independent candidate Evan McMullin instead.
By the time Vance launched his 2022 Senate campaign, though, he’d dramatically changed his tune, to the extent that he won Trump’s coveted endorsement in the competitive GOP primary. He embraced a Trump-esque combative style on the campaign trail and ran as an “America First” conservative who’d push back against the “woke” agenda of Democrats and left-leaning elites in media and tech. As a senator, Vance has become a spokesperson for the “New Right,” a loose conservative movement that embraces Trump’s populism, economic protectionism, cultural conservatism and opposition to intervention in foreign conflicts like the Ukraine-Russia war.
Trump’s selection of Vance features some interesting historical wrinkles. For one thing, Vance will be 40 years old by Election Day, making him the youngest vice presidential pick since Richard Nixon (39) in 1952. This also makes Vance the first millennial to take a spot on a national party ticket.
Vance’s relative youth could be a plus in an environment where the two parties look set to nominate the oldest pair of presidential candidates in U.S. history.
