JD Vance: How vice-presidential candidate used his ‘hillbilly’ background to catapult himself to the top of US politics

When JD Vance says he came from nothing, he really means it.

There are plenty of clichés that seemingly encapsulate how a child born in poverty can go on to become a vice presidential candidate by the age of 39; it’s almost the perfect example of the “American Dream”.

But Donald Trump’s running mate isn’t in this position in spite of his challenging upbringing – in many ways, he’s there because of it.

This is how JD Vance took his experiences as a self-proclaimed hillbilly and used them to write a bestselling book and propel himself to the top of politics.

Hillbilly Elegy

In his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Mr Vance, born into an impoverished household in southern Ohio, shares stories about his chaotic family life and about communities that had declined and seemed to lose hope.

He details his own journey and how he navigated his dysfunctional family.

There’s his grandmother, who he refers to as Mamaw, who helped raise him on “tough love” – and once doused his Papaw with gasoline and dropped a lit match to punish him for being unfaithful. He escaped with minor burns.

Then there is his mother, who struggled to care for him as she battled a drug addiction and at one point forced him to provide a urine sample for her drug test.

He analyses his experiences growing up in Ohio to reflect on why the working-class American region of Appalachia, which consists of 13 states from southern New York to northern Mississippi, changed from reliably Democratic to reliably Republican.

He does this not just by looking at his family, but also at the troubled community around him. He highlights the impact the steel industry’s struggles in the 1970s had on his city, along with the opioid crisis which plagued the country.

“It is in Greater Appalachia where the fortunes of working-class whites seem dimmest. From low social mobility to poverty to divorce and drug addiction, my home is a hub of misery,” he writes in the introduction.

He goes on to say he identifies with the “millions of working-class Americans who have no college degree”.

“To these folks, poverty is the family tradition – their ancestors were day labourers in the southern slave economy, share-croppers after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times.

“Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks or white trash. I call them neighbours, friends and family.”

The book was written by Mr Vance in his late 20s/early 30s. By that point, he had gone on to serve in the Marine Corps, graduate from Yale Law School where he met his wife Usha, and become a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.

Critical acclaim – and some critiques

To many liberal Americans struggling to understand why a wealthy New York businessman like Donald Trump was appealing to so many struggling working-class voters in the 2016 US election, the book was something of a revelation.

And conservatives were also widely keen on the book, which criticised the welfare system and what Vance saw as “too many young men immune to hard work”.

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It was called “one of the six best books to help understand Trump’s win”, by The New York Times and given rave reviews by the likes of The Wall Street Journal and The Economist.

But it also garnered plenty of criticism, with some – particularly across Appalachia – faulting it as a stereotypical and misleading portrait of the region and of poverty in the US, while ignoring the role of racism in politics.

National talk shows and columnists – whether praising the book or finding fault with it – were giving it plenty of publicity.

Memoir sells millions

The book quickly hit best-seller lists and sold more than three million copies before Mr Trump chose him for the Republican ticket, according to its publishers HarperCollins.

The memoir’s sales were boosted in 2020 after it was made into a Netflix film directed by Ron Howard and starring Amy Adams as Mr Vance’s mum Bev and Glenn Close as his grandmother.

Mr Vance himself was played by Gabriel Basso, while Owen Asztalos played a younger version of him in flashbacks.

And as Mr Vance moved away from capital ventures and into politics, his stock continued to rise.

He became a popular political commentator on TV and announced he was running to become the state of Ohio’s senator in 2022. He was subsequently elected and sworn into office in January 2023.

Once a ‘never Trumper’

It’s clear to see Mr Vance always understood the former president’s appeal for voters.

“He communicates in a way that is very relatable to a lot of people; it’s one of the things that both parties frankly have been increasingly bad at, which is connecting to voters in an emotional and kind of visceral way, and I think Trump does that,” he said in August 2016 – months before Mr Trump was elected.

“And he is tapping into a substantive concern that people have… the sense America’s best days are behind it and the future doesn’t hold a whole lot of promise.”

While he may have understood him, Mr Vance was actually highly critical of Mr Trump in 2016.

He once described himself as a “never Trumper” and – after his election win – labelled the then-president an “idiot” and said he could be “America’s Hitler”.

“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” Mr Vance wrote privately to an associate on Facebook in 2016.

When his Hitler comment was first reported, in 2022, a spokesperson did not dispute it, but said it no longer represented Vance’s views.

Vance’s Trump U-turn

Mr Vance of course changed his mind.

The book itself may have even played a big role in that process, as he is said to have grown close with Donald Trump Jr because he was a big fan of the memoir.

The two became friends and by the time Mr Vance met Mr Trump in 2021, he had reversed his opinion, citing his accomplishments as president.

By the time Mr Vance ran for the Senate in 2022 his demonstrations of loyalty – which included downplaying the January 6 Capitol riots – were sufficient to score Mr Trump’s coveted endorsement.

Mr Trump’s support helped put him over the top in a competitive primary.

In interviews Mr Vance has said there was no ‘eureka’ moment that changed his mind on Mr Trump. Instead, he claimed to have gradually realised that his opposition to Mr Trump was rooted in style over substance.

Some have criticised him for the shift as he continues to distance himself from some of his old comments. Not only that – but from his memoir.

He recently told The New York Times he had distanced himself from Hillbilly Elegy in order not to “wake up in 10 years and really hate everything that I’ve become.”

Fast-forward to now and Mr Vance is campaigning alongside Mr Trump ahead of what promises to be a dramatic election day on 5 November.

His memoir sales will be in Mr Vance’s peripheral at this late stage in the race – but it’s worth noting more than 650,000 copies were bought in the 10 days after Mr Trump announced him as running mate.