MILWAUKEE — When Sen. JD Vance accepts the Republican nomination for vice president here Wednesday night, the Ohioan will draw on his turbulent upbringing in a family that wrestled with drug addiction and other socioeconomic crises in a Midwest steel town.
It’s a story of working-class struggle familiar to those who read “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance’s bestselling 2016 memoir, or who saw the 2020 movie on Netflix adapted from it.
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And though Vance’s story will be new to many in a broader prime-time audience, former President Donald Trump’s campaign hopes it will ring true and reinforce his strength with blue-collar voters in battleground states. Vance will connect his experiences to issues like trade, inflation, immigration and the fentanyl crisis and to Trump’s policies for addressing them, multiple sources familiar with his speech told NBC News.
Vance also is expected to emphasize his military background. The former Marine is the first post-9/11 veteran to run on a major party ticket, and the first veteran at all on a major party’s ticket since the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., ran for president in 2008.
The themes of the speech line up with lofty expectations for Vance, 39, who also would be the third-youngest vice president in U.S. history if elected.
Republicans here for the party’s national convention see him as a running mate who can rally the base in Pennsylvania and the industrial Midwest. Recent appearances on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and other mainstream news shows have buoyed confidence that Vance can competently field hardball questions outside the safe and friendly right-wing media sphere.
“People feel like Washington’s forgotten about them,” former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said in an interview. “That’s JD Vance, his family. Those are people across this country, who, like his family, suffered from drug addiction, suffered poverty. He wrote about that, obviously, in his book, and then you saw it on Netflix. And I think that’s going to be compelling — to say that this is someone who can relate to the kind of people that Donald Trump is standing up for.”
Michigan GOP Chairman Pete Hoekstra also noted how Vance’s personal story can help amplify Trump’s message and agenda.
“Lots of people can relate to a vice president who can talk about his life as a young person and where it was hard, where life was tough,” Hoekstra, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the Netherlands, said. “That’s a place that a lot of Michiganders find themselves in today.”
In interviews this week, many GOP officials and delegates offered the same three words when asked about Vance’s strengths: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Those states were key to Trump’s winning coalition in 2020, but four years later he lost all three by narrow margins to President Joe Biden.
“He’s going to connect so well with these states that are so important in this upcoming election — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan,” Riley Moore, a congressional candidate and the Republican state treasurer in West Virginia, said. “He represents those kinds of values and a lot of those struggles that he went through.”
Charlie Kirk, a young right-wing leader within Trump’s MAGA movement who advocated for Vance’s selection, said he believes Vance's youth and geographic base will complement Trump.
“We have the lowest number of undecided voters of any major presidential election in the modern era,” Kirk said. “This is a base turnout election, and it’s a regional election. It’s closer to 20 or 30 mayors’ races than it is a presidential election. It’s western Pennsylvania, southwestern Michigan, right where we are, right here, southeastern Wisconsin. JD Vance is the Rust Belt boost candidate.”
Scott Guthrie, a GOP strategist who had a front-row seat to Vance’s rise in Ohio, recalled the state’s brutal 2022 Senate primary, which Vance won after an endorsement from Trump. Guthrie had been running the campaign for Josh Mandel, a former state treasurer who started as the front-runner in the polls.
“As we prepared for potential opponents, the candidate who we worried about most was JD Vance,” Guthrie said. “We knew he would come into the Senate race with a compelling personal story, strong financial support and a lot of potential to connect with voters in the rural parts of the state, Appalachia and the Rust Belt.”
“As the vice presidential nominee, JD brings this strength to the national stage and will be a vital part of President Trump’s campaign to win over swing voters in key swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,” Guthrie added. “He has the ability to make television appearances and speak effectively and directly to these key swing voters but can also go out and connect with crowds in person at rallies and other campaign stops.”
Vance’s media presence was something his political team worked to burnish as Trump’s search for a running mate intensified. Rather than anchoring him exclusively to right-leaning programming on Fox News and Newsmax, his strategists put him on what they viewed as more adversarial shows — forums in which he could debate moderators and defend Trump aggressively, but politely.
“I see him do so much better in sort of what’s called hostile media territory,” Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son and a leading advocate for Vance’s selection, said Tuesday at an event hosted by Axios.
The Vance selection especially rallied his home state delegation this week. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press NOW,” marveled how the Buckeye State hadn’t had a candidate on a major party’s national ticket since Republican John Bricker ran for vice president with Thomas Dewey in 1944.
“He can relate to a mom who doesn’t have enough food, he can relate to a family who’s got someone who’s got a mental health problem or an addiction problem,” DeWine, a Republican, said of Vance. “That’s helpful, politically, but it’s also, I think, going to be helpful when he is vice president. Going through trauma yourself, seeing your family go through trauma, it just makes you a different person.”
Ohio Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, in an interview on the convention floor Tuesday night, noted how Vance’s hometown is a facsimile for other hollowed-out industrial towns.
“He grew up in Middletown, Ohio,” Husted said. “That’s where you see powerful companies like AK Steel that used to run that town and used to be a source of bounty for so many families. To see it wither away to the point that now it’s a shell of what it once was — he gets all that. Middle America is going to decide this election: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. And nobody can go toe-to-toe with him in those states on those issues.”
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost offered a similar anatomical observation while assessing Vance’s gift for taking the fight to mainstream media.
“He can go toe-to-toe with any of them,” Yost said. “There’s not an anchor or an interviewer out there on the coast that I wouldn’t put JD in a room with, confident that he can handle himself.”
