JD Vance: A Genuine Political Figure Who Cares About Average People, Ideal for Trump and America

Donald Trump’s announcement that Ohio Sen. JD Vance is his vice-presidential pick was music to my ears.

I’ve known Vance for more than a decade and can attest to his smarts, his seriousness and his undying devotion to America and its working class.

He is an ideal pick for Trump and one that presages the transformation of the Republican Party into a true, multi-ethnic working-class coalition.

I met JD at a political seminar in 2015. We quickly bonded over our shared interest in using public policy to help the country’s struggling working-class voters. In this pre-Trump age, that was not a popular position within the GOP.

But that didn’t matter to him. JD was interested in helping people, not currying favor with an insider elite.

His breakout bestselling book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was further proof of that sincere, deeply held desire.

A clear message ran through the vivid personal story and shocking anecdotes: America’s elite class has betrayed the workers who make America great.

Throughout the years we would periodically meet up at a political event and share notes and swap stories.

JD was always the same guy, genuinely curious and passionate about changing the trajectory for the people America’s elites were leaving behind.

And unlike many politically active people, he wasn’t locked into an ideology that provided the seductively simple answer to all things. He was thinking, searching, studying. He wanted the truth and solutions that could work, not bromides that make for good soundbites but could never be implemented in real life.

He’s shown that in spades over the past few years as he first increased his public presence and then entered the political arena.

His speeches are not garden-variety political pabulum. He doesn’t give you poll-tested lines that don’t connect to one another logically, much less to a common theme.

JD’s speeches flow from a serious world view and make serious arguments. That’s a rare talent at any time but is in especially low supply today.

This is another reason I think he can make a huge impact. Americans crave a serious political figure who genuinely cares about average people and those who are struggling.

They want someone who pulls ideas from the old left and the old right to create something genuinely new and uniquely American. Vance can and will give them exactly what they have been seeking for 30 years.

President Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and even Trump have struggled to do this for various reasons.

Most Republicans don’t even try, relying instead on the same old economics and dressing it up with culture-war and anti-immigration dressing. The result: more voter frustration, rising rates of political anger and increasing identification as political independents.

Vance can break this cycle. He won’t do it immediately, as Trump will remain the big dog in this partnership.

But any vice president works to serve his or her boss while carving out a separate identity. Vance’s identity will be uniquely thoughtful and uniquely appealing.

His intelligence and articulateness will help him chart this course. Watch a Vance interview on a TV talk show.

Politicians today are trained to use any question to pivot to the topic they want to talk about. The result is the obviously phony and rehearsed politics Americans increasingly reject.

Vance, on the other hand, actually engages with his questioner. He gives the answer he wants, but he doesn’t avoid the topic.

Nor does he fawn before his interlocutor. He can push back when the interviewer misstates something or pushes for a gotcha moment.

That sort of skill can be honed, but it can’t be taught. It’s the talent that only a genuinely thoughtful person who knows what they believe can pull off.

Elites despise Vance because of these traits. They may have met and known him almost as long as I have, but almost to a person they never sympathized with his world view. They saw him as simply another version of one of them, a smart person with elite credentials who didn’t like Donald Trump.

When he changed his mind about Trump — without changing his philosophy, mind you — they changed their minds about him. That says much more about today’s paragons of privilege than it does about JD

I expect Vance will be the breakout star of this campaign. He’ll run rings around Vice President Kamala Harris in their debate, and average voters will see that he’s the real deal.

Unburdened by the GOP’s past free-market fundamentalism, he’ll become what Americans long for. He’ll connect with real people in a way the Acela Corridor pundits can’t begin to imagine.

If Trump is as smart as I think he is, he’ll carve out a huge role for JD in his administration. Who better to oversee the implantation of a new, worker-friendly domestic policy agenda than the man who’s spent the better part of his adult life thinking about one?

And who better to sell it than a person who’s clearly, like Trump, a master communicator?

Vance’s rise has been meteoric, and he’s now in the political big leagues. Like any newly promoted prospect, he’ll struggle sometimes as he adjusts to the new challenge

I expect he’ll rise to the occasion as he has at every step of the way in his life. Trump and America will be the beneficiaries.

Henry Olsen, a political analyst and commentator, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.