The announcement was met with cheers and chants of ‘USA’ in Milwaukee.
Milwaukee –Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s selection of J. D. Vance as his running mate was met with cheers and chants of “USA” on the floor of the Republican National Convention on Monday.
Trump announced the 39-year-old freshman Senator from Ohio as his running mate in a social-media post Monday afternoon — adding a populist, Rust Belt flair to his ticket in an apparent effort to appeal to working-class voters in his 2024 rematch against President Joe Biden. The announcement came just before Trump formally clinched the GOP nomination.
A Yale Law School graduate, former U.S. Marine, Hillbilly Elegy author and close friend of Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., Vance has long been seen as a potential heir apparent to the 2024 nominee a little less than two years into his first Senate term.
The announcement caps months of vice-presidential speculation that ended up zeroing in on Vance, Florida Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum in the final weeks before the convention. And it supercharges a GOP convention that is fiercely united around Trump now two days after the former president survived an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally.
“This is a candidate that’s going to help the ticket,” says Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager who is advising this year’s delegate and convention process. “I love the pick.”
Trump’s decision to tap this young rising star as his running mate comes as welcome news to Ohio Republicans, who were brimming with emotion on the convention floor Monday afternoon minutes after Trump made his announcement. Many of them held Trump signs with Vance’s name scribbled in Sharpie underneath as they cheered the Ohio senator’s entrance into the arena alongside his wife, Usha, to a fitting walk-up tune — Merle Haggard’s “America First.”
“He’s the perfect choice,” Ohio GOP Chairman Alex Triantafilou told National Review on the convention floor Monday afternoon. “If you’re a middle-class American and you’re looking at this ticket, and wondering why should I vote for the Republicans — J.D. Vance has lived that experience.”
And the chairman insisted that Vance’s prior criticisms of the former president before the 2016 election are “ancient history” and won’t hurt the ticket even if Democrats run attack ads highlighting Vance’s own prior self-identification as a “Never Trump guy.”
“I’m not worried one bit about that past criticism,” Triantafilou said.
The news came as an especially welcome development to 2024 Republican Senate nominee Bernie Moreno, a close friend of Vance who helped him with debate prep against Democratic congressman Tim Ryan in 2022. “Here we are two years later, and I’m so incredibly honored to be able to do what I just did, which is to second the motion to have him be vice president of the United States,” Moreno, who will face Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown in November, told National Reviewin a brief interview on the convention floor.
Vance’s vacancy will give Governor Mike DeWine the power to appoint an interim senator in this red-leaning state Trump carried by eight points in 2016 and 2020. A number of names have already begun swirling in Ohio Republican politics as potential Vance replacements, including former state senator and two-time Senate candidate Matt Dolan, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and Representatives Dave Joyce and Jim Jordan, among others.
Ohio’s RNC committeewoman Jane Timken, who competed against Vance in the 2022 Senate primary and praised him as Trump’s vice presidential pick, told NR it’s “premature” to speculate about potential replacement. Yet she signaled she’s interested in the job.
“I would obviously consider it and I love Ohio and I would love to serve,” Timken told NR on the convention floor Monday. “I just have to make sure that’s the right choice for me. And obviously, it’s not up to me, it’s up to Governor Mike DeWine.”