Four years ago, Sen. JD Vance told Megyn Kelly during an interview for her podcast, “I’m one of those guys who really benefits from having, like, a sort of powerful female voice on his left shoulder saying, ‘don’t do that, do do that.’” That powerful female voice is Usha Vance.
In that same podcast interview, the 39-year-old Ohio senator, who has been thrust into the spotlight since being named former President Donald Trump’s running mate on Monday, described his 38-year-old wife as “brilliant” and “way more accomplished than I am.”
So who is Usha Vance, the potential future second lady of the United States?
She was raised by Indian immigrant parents in Southern California and is now of mom of three
Usha Vance, formerly Usha Chilukuri, was born and raised in a suburb of San Diego by Indian immigrant parents. Her mother is a marine molecular biologist and biochemist and a provost at the University of California San Diego, and her father is an engineer.
“She was never mean or unkind, but she was the boss,” a close family friend told The New York Times in 2022 of young Usha. It’s unclear if she has any siblings.
She received a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University and a master’s in philosophy from the University of Cambridge, where she studied the origins of copyright law, the Times said.
She and JD have three young children. Their oldest was born in 2017, their second was born in 2020 and the youngest was born in 2021.
She and JD Vance met at Yale University
According to the Times, Usha volunteered to help the homeless, tutored public school students and edited a public school advocacy magazine called Our Education while studying at Yale. She also held several editorial positions for the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal of Law & Technology.
Usha and JD met at Yale Law School while part of a small group of first-year students who took all of the same classes. Both were in professor Amy Chua’s contract law course. Chua became an important mentor for JD, encouraging him to write what would become his national bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” Chua has said in previous interviews she saw he was in love with Usha and encouraged him to pursue her and focus on his love life.
“He felt very different,” Usha said in a 2017 interview with Megyn Kelly for NBC.
“Usha was like my Yale spirit guide,” he wrote in his memoir. “She instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask and she always encouraged me to seek opportunities that I didn’t know existed.”
JD also described her in his memoir as having a “great sense of humor“ and “an extraordinarily direct way of speaking.”
“She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful,” he said.
The pair were married in Kentucky in 2014. A separate ceremony was held with a Hindu priest, according to the Times, as Usha was raised Hindu and JD converted to Catholicism later in life.
Netflix debuted an adaptation of JD’s memoir in 2020 with stars like Glenn Close and Amy Adams. The roles of JD and Usha were played by Gabriel Basso and Freida Pinto.
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Jeff Dean / AP
She is an accomplished lawyer
Usha had held several prestigious clerkships, including in the U.S. Eastern District of Kentucky and for Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh while he was a judge at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Following the announcement that JD would be a vice presidential nominee, Usha resigned from her position as a litigator for Munger, Tolles & Olson, the law firm said. She joined the firm in 2015 after she and JD moved to San Francisco, where JD worked as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. According to her professional biography, which has now been removed from the firm’s site, her work included cases on higher education, local government, entertainment and technology.
Usha and JD are a political paradox
Up until 2014, Usha was a registered Democrat. But several outlets have reported more recent records show her registered as a Republican. The Times said two of her former colleagues, who chose to remain anonymous, described her as a liberal or moderate despite her resume of clerking for conservative judges. The law firm where Usha worked up until recently was described in an article for “The American Lawyer” as “radically progressive.”
Her husband is a political newcomer, elected as a junior U.S. senator in Ohio in 2022. In JD’s Senate biography and his memoir, he said he was raised by his grandmother — “a ‘blue dog’ Democrat” who “owned 19 handguns and nurtured a deep Christian faith in herself and her family.” He was once very critical of Trump, slinging a laundry list of public and private insults. However, JD has backtracked on his anti-Trump reviews, aligned himself with the Republican party’s far-right field and eventually earned an endorsement from the former president during his senate campaign before being chosen as his 2024 presidential election running mate.
There are other parts of JD’s path to becoming the Republican vice presidential candidate that are lined with contradictions to his personal life. For example, his speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021 was titled “The Universities are the Enemy.” In it, he said “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country” and that “they pursue deceit and lies.”
But in previous interviews, he spoke positively of his experience at Yale and said he saw it as a way out of his tumultuous childhood. He also accepted an honorary degree from Centre College, a private liberal arts school in Kentucky, where he was the commencement speaker in 2017. Notably, his mother-in-law is a professor and holds a key administrative position at the University of California San Diego, while his wife’s work as a lawyer included defending the University of California against claims that it violated Title IX, according to the Times.
While Usha’s personal political views have remained mostly unspoken, she has stood beside JD through his political journey, appearing in campaign ads and alongside him for televised interviews. She has said her focus is on supporting JD and their family.
