MILWAUKEE — When Senator JD Vance accepts Republican Vice Presidential Nomination Tuesday will draw on his turbulent upbringing in a Midwest steel town here in Ohio, in a family that struggled with drug addiction and other socioeconomic crises.
It’s a story of working-class struggle familiar to those who have read Vance’s 2016 best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy or seen the 2020 Netflix film adaptation of it.
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While Vance’s story may be new to many in the broader primetime audience, former President Donald Trump’s campaign hopes it will ring true and strengthen its hold with blue-collar voters in battleground states. Vance will relate his experiences to issues such as trade, inflation, immigration and the fentanyl crisis and Trump’s policies to address them, multiple sources familiar with his speech told NBC News.
Vance is also expected to highlight his military background. The former Marine is the first veteran to run on a major party ticket since 9/11 and the first veteran to receive a major party ticket at all since the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., ran for president in 2008.
The themes of the speech coincide with high expectations for the 39-year-old Vance, who will become the third youngest vice president in US history.
Republicans here for the party’s national convention see him as a candidate who can rally the base in Pennsylvania and the industrial Midwest. In the meantime, final appearances NBC’s “Meet the Press” and other mainstream news shows have fueled confidence that Vance can deftly ask tough questions outside the safe and friendly sphere of the right-wing media.
Former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said in an interview, “People feel that Washington has forgotten them. “This is JD Vance, his family. These are people all over the country who suffer from drug addiction and poverty, just like his family. He obviously wrote about it in his book, then you saw it on Netflix. I think it’s going to have to say that Donald Trump is someone who can relate to the people he’s standing up for.”
Michigan GOP Chairman Pete Hoekstra also noted how Vance’s personal story could help bolster Trump’s message and agenda.
“A lot of people can relate to a vice president who can talk about his youth and how hard it is, life is hard,” said Hoekstra, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the Netherlands. “That’s where a lot of Michiganders find themselves 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 narrowly lost all three to President Joe Biden.
“He’s going to connect very well with these states that are very important in the upcoming election — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan,” said Riley Moore, a congressional candidate and Republican state treasurer in West Virginia. “He represents those kinds of values and a lot of the struggles that he went through.”
Charlie Kirk, the young right-wing leader of Trump’s MAGA movement, who advocated for Vance’s election, believes his youth and geographic base will complement Trump.
“We have the least undecided voters of any major presidential election in modern times,” Kirk said. “This is a main election and a regional election. It is closer to the race of 20-30 mayors than the presidential elections. It’s in western Pennsylvania, southwest Michigan, where we are, here in southeast Wisconsin. JD Vance is a Rust Belt booster candidate.
Scott Guthrie, a GOP strategist who sat on the front lines of Vance’s rise in Ohio, recalled the state’s brutal 2022 Senate primary, which Vance won after Trump’s endorsement. Guthrie was campaigning for former state treasurer Josh Mandel, who started as a trailblazer.
“When preparing for potential opponents, the candidate we were most concerned about was JD Vance,” Guthrie said. “We knew he would come to the Senate race with a compelling personal story, strong financial support and plenty of potential to connect with voters in rural Appalachia and the Rust Belt region of the state.”
“As a vice presidential candidate, JD brings that strength to the national stage and will be an important part of President Trump’s campaign to attract swing voters in key states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin,” Guthrie said. “He has the ability to make television appearances and speak effectively and directly to these key swing voters, but he can also get out in person at rallies and other campaign stops and connect with crowds.”
Vance’s media presence was something his political team tried to burn as the search for Trump’s running mate intensified. Instead of tying him exclusively to right-wing programming on Fox News and Newsmax, his strategists are putting him on what they see as more rival shows — forums where he can argue with moderators and aggressively but politely defend Trump.
“I see her doing better in what is called hostile media territory,” Donald Trump Jr., son of the former president and a leading advocate for Vance’s election, said Tuesday at an event hosted by Axios.
Vance’s choice has especially rallied his home state delegation this week. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, one interview On NBC’s “Meet the Press Now,” Republican John Bricker marveled at the lack of a major-party national ticket candidate in the Buckeye State as he ran for vice president with Thomas Dewey in 1944.
“She can relate to a mother who doesn’t have enough food, she can relate to a family with someone who has a mental health problem or an addiction problem,” DeWine said of Vance. “It’s useful politically, but I think it will also be useful when he becomes vice president. Going through trauma yourself, seeing your family go through trauma, just makes you a different person.”
In a congressional interview Tuesday night, Ohio Gov. John Husted pointed out how Vance’s hometown is a facsimile of other potholed industrial towns.
“He grew up in Middletown, Ohio,” Husted said. “Here you see powerful companies like AK Steel that ruled that city and were a source of grace for many families. To see him wither away, now he’s just a shell of what he used to be – he gets all that. Middle America will decide this election: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. And no one in these states can keep up with him on these issues.”
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost offered a similarly anatomical observation in assessing Vance’s gift for fighting the mainstream media.
“He can go toe-to-toe with any of them,” Yost said. “I don’t have a host or interviewer on the coast that I wouldn’t put in the room with JD, confident he can handle himself.”