Usha Vance is adjusting to life as a prominent political spouse

WASHINGTON - The night before the biggest assignment of her life, Mrs Usha Vance stayed up late with her husband, Mr J.D. Vance. In their rooms at the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee, they went over each other’s speeches to the Republican National Convention. She gave notes on his, and he tweaked hers.

In keeping with many intellectual and professional endeavours over the course of their relationship, which got its start at Yale Law School more than a decade ago, they approached the task as a couple.

Their lives were about to undergo a dramatic change. Two days earlier, former president Donald Trump had announced the selection of

Mr Vance as his running mate on the Republican presidential ticket

.

Mr Vance was used to the spotlight, having made his name as the bestselling author of the memoir Hillbilly Elegy years before he was elected to the United States Senate in 2022, but his wife had remained largely a private figure.

Whatever nerves the self-possessed Mrs Vance might have been feeling, she had allies bolstering her confidence. In the hours before she stepped onto the stage, a long-time friend texted her a trailer from Bring It On, the 2000 movie about highly competitive cheerleaders that was filmed in part at the high school she attended in San Diego.

Standing on the stage of Fiserv Forum before an audience of more than 17,000, with millions more watching on television, Mrs Vance delivered a speech that was direct and conversational, without the theatrical bluster employed by many of her fellow convention speakers.

“When I was asked to introduce my husband, J.D. Vance, to all of you, I was at a loss,” she began. “What could I say that hasn’t already been said before? After all, the man was already the subject of a Ron Howard movie.”

With that line, a reference to the Oscar-nominated film based on her husband’s book, she earned her first laugh, and any jitters she might have had seemed to disappear.

Those who know her said they had never had any doubt that she would bring it at the convention. After all,

Mrs Vance is used to acing tests

.

“She’s never gotten a B her entire life,” said Mr Dan Driscoll, a family friend and fellow Yale Law School graduate who was with the couple at the Pfister Hotel and is serving as a campaign adviser to Mr Vance.

Since childhood, Mrs Vance, a daughter of Indian immigrants who grew up in Rancho Penasquitos, a middle-class neighbourhood of San Diego, has experienced an unbroken sequence of successes in elite academic and professional institutions, including Yale College, University of Cambridge, Yale Law School and the Supreme Court, where she served as a clerk.

It is the resume of someone destined to reach the pinnacle of American achievement. So, in that sense, her elevation to a marquee stage in national politics is unsurprising.

But the fact that she delivered her speech to a party now dominated by Trump’s combative brand of politics is perhaps less likely. A cerebral person, Mrs Vance chooses her words carefully, and friends describe her as apolitical. Her speech did not contain the words “Trump” or “Republican”.

Law school romance

In 2006, when she was a junior at Yale College, Mrs Vance – then Ms Usha Chilukuri – was featured as one of the university’s “50 most beautiful” students by a campus magazine. An accompanying story featured a photograph of her giving what was described in the caption as “a smile as bright as the San Diego sun”.

The article characterised her views as “of the leftish political persuasion” while noting that her romantic partners did not necessarily share her ideology. “She does like a man who has a lot to say for himself,” the story said. “In the past, most of her liaisons have been tall, handsome, and conservative.”

In the autumn of 2010, at Yale Law School, she found herself in a group for first-year students with Mr Vance, a military veteran who was then, as she put it in her convention speech, “fresh out of Ohio State, which he attended with the support of the GI Bill”.

Their differences were immediately apparent. She was raised by a mechanical engineer and a biologist in a tight-knit community of families who had immigrated from India before settling in Rancho Penasquitos. He had a tough childhood in south-western Ohio, where he was raised mainly by his maternal grandparents.

“Who wouldn’t want to be friends with J.D.?” Mrs Vance said in her speech, going on to describe him as “a working-class guy who had overcome childhood traumas that I could barely fathom, to end up at Yale Law School, a tough Marine who had served in Iraq, but whose idea of a good time was playing with puppies and watching the movie Babe”.

In Hillbilly Elegy, Mr Vance wrote of his initial impression of his future wife as “a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall and beautiful”.

Neither of them enjoyed the kind of generational privilege or insider advantage that marked the elite set within that elite school.

And they both sought out iconoclastic professor Amy Chua, who set off a cultural storm with her 2011 memoir Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother, in which she made the case that parents must push their children towards excellence, rather than allow them to settle for mere participation trophies. At Yale, Prof Chua was known for mentoring ambitious students from immigrant backgrounds.

Usha and J.D. teamed up and thrived, leading an informal class on economic development in the industrialised Midwest, an enterprise that would inform Mr Vance’s book. They also cultivated a politically heterogenous group of friends.

One friend, Mr James Eimers, recalled a small but meaningful favour Mrs Vance had done for him. At the time, he was romantically interested in a fellow student who happened to be trying to sell a table.

Mrs Vance had no need for a table, but she bought it anyway and asked Mr Eimers – who owned a pickup truck – to fetch it for her. It was just her way of giving him a chance to talk with his crush. In an e-mail, Mr Eimers confirmed that he had picked up the “superfluous table, as well as a date”.

As Mrs Vance mentioned in her convention speech, she took Mr Vance to meet her parents. “Although he’s a meat and potatoes kind of guy,” she said, “he adapted to my vegetarian diet and learnt to cook food from my mother, Indian food. Before I knew it, he’d become an integral part of my family, a person I could not imagine living without.”

They were married in Kentucky in 2014, with wooden benches for guests set outside in the grass. In a separate ceremony, they were blessed by a Hindu pandit. In July, businessman Anand Mahindra posted photos of the wedding on X. They show the couple dressed in traditional Hindu garb beneath bright skies.

Early in their marriage, they moved around a lot, with stops in Columbus, Ohio, Cincinnati and Washington, DC. Mrs Vance pursued ever more prestigious clerkships, working under Judge Brett Kavanaugh in the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit and then under Chief Justice John Roberts at the Supreme Court.

In 2015, the Vances moved to San Francisco. Mrs Vance started as an associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson, while Mr Vance went to work at Mithril Capital, an investment firm co-founded by Mr Peter Thiel, and finished writing Hillbilly Elegy.

At Munger, which is known for its selectiveness in hiring and its progressive outlook, Mrs Vance worked as a civil litigator representing clients including the Pacific Gas & Electric Co, Disney and the University of California.

Mr Vance has described his wife as a key adviser who keeps him humble. “If I get a little too cocky or a little too proud, I just remind myself that she’s way more accomplished than I,” he told Megyn Kelly in a podcast interview in 2020. “I’m one of those guys who really benefits from having sort of a powerful female voice over his left shoulder saying, ‘Don’t do that, do that.’”

Though the Vances were driven to succeed, they were also eager to start a family. In her convention speech, Mrs Vance said that her husband’s “one overriding ambition” was “to become a husband and a father and to build the kind of tight-knit family that he had longed for as a child”. Today, the couple has three children under eight.

Around 2018, the Vances moved to a diverse neighbourhood on the east side of Cincinnati, where they own a 5,000 sq ft Victorian Gothic house that dates to 1858. Mrs Vance joined the board of the city’s symphony orchestra at the urging of Mr Rob McDonald, who befriended the couple after he met Mr Vance when trying to recruit him to the law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister.

In an interview for this story, Mr McDonald said that Mrs Vance’s background in intellectual property law had been an asset as the symphony figured out how to make its music available for streaming. She left the board in 2023, at the end of her three-year term.

Since Mr Vance’s election to the Senate in 2022, the family has toggled between northern Virginia and Cincinnati. In Ohio, they spend time with their children and family friends, attending events at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and swimming in their backyard pool. When it comes to cooking, Mr Vance tackles breakfast and desserts like chocolate mousse, while Mrs Vance takes charge of the more healthful fare, friends said.

The shift to Maga

For most of her adult life, Mrs Vance’s friends and colleagues understood her to be a liberal or a centrist. She was registered as a Democrat as recently as 2014 and kept liberal and leftist circles during a fellowship at Cambridge. Colleagues at Munger, Tolles & Olson – a firm described in a 2019 American Lawyer article as “cool” and “woke” – remember her as a moderate.

Still, Mrs Vance’s beliefs remain a matter of speculation, and she did not comment for this story. Judges Roberts and Kavanaugh, for whom she served as a clerk, are legal conservatives. And Mrs Vance’s friends and colleagues said she rarely discussed politics, and never in a partisan way. But as her husband’s politics have changed, she has been there to support him.

A turning point may have come when the film version of Hillbilly Elegy, which has recently popped into the list of most-watched movies on Netflix, was released to a critical drubbing in 2020. According to a family friend, the Vances were stung by the criticism of the movie, in which Mrs Vance was played by Freida Pinto.

Since going into politics, Mr Vance has given up his role as someone who explains working-class white resentment to liberals to become a leading voice in the Maga movement.

Mrs Vance’s unflagging support of her husband during his political evolution has put her, from the outside at least, in a tense position: Endorsing a political ideology that targets the elite institutions that helped shape her.

In November 2021, when he was running for the Senate and transforming himself from one of Trump’s toughest critics into one of his most ardent supporters, Mr Vance gave a speech to the National Conservatism Conference titled The Universities Are The Enemy.

In a February interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, Mr Vance seemed to back Trump’s stance that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent and said that President Joe Biden’s victory should not have been immediately certified.

Now Mrs Vance, the picture of meritocratic ambition, finds herself cast as a political wife, a traditionally passive role. Last week, representatives working with the Trump-Vance campaign said she would rather be referred to as Mrs Vance than Ms Vance.

Friends say they expect Mrs Vance, already laser focused on her family, to spend even more time with her children between now and the election. Indeed, on the day of her convention speech, she resigned from her job at Munger, Tolles & Olson. In a statement to People magazine, she said that she had done so “to focus on caring for our family”.

But she has the skills to go out on the stump, according to Mr Jai Chabria, an Ohio political consultant who served as chief strategist for Mr Vance’s Senate campaign.

Mrs Vance did not hit the trail very often in the 2022 Senate race, he said, because she had just given birth to the couple’s third child – but when she did go out before the public, she rose to the occasion.

“Every time voters met her or were able to see her, it was a ‘wow,’” Mr Chabria said. “There is this quiet confidence with her. I think people are drawn to it.” NYTIMES