Vice President JD Vance’s unusual second job as the finance chair of the Republican National Committee is exactly the kind of role an ambitious presidential aspirant might dream up.
He’s been able to do some good for the party, raising tens of millions of dollars at events for Republicans as they head into the midterms. And he’s been able to do some good for himself, wooing some of his party’s richest and most influential patrons.
Mr. Vance and his team have been leery of being seen as plotting about anything beyond the 2026 midterms, or of drawing attention to President Trump’s limited time left in the White House and the Republican race to succeed him.
But as the first vice president to serve as the finance chair of the party, Mr. Vance has been taking full advantage of the opportunity to win the hearts and minds of top Republican financiers — both skeptics, of whom there are plenty, and loyalists. And when he shows up at these fund-raisers, guests are prone to ask the obvious: You’re running, right?
That query was posed to Usha Vance, Mr. Vance’s wife, as the final question at an intimate fund-raising dinner last month in the Austin, Texas, home of Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, featuring Mr. Vance as the guest of honor and spicy tuna as an appetizer.
Mr. Vance’s staff immediately joked that they had run out of time, four people with knowledge of the moment recalled. When he got to answer, the vice president thanked them for shielding his wife from a politically delicate question, and then spoke about another topic.
Some of Mr. Vance’s higher profile outings on the world stage in recent days have yielded awkward headlines. He went to Hungary to campaign for Prime Minister Viktor Orban a few days before Mr. Orban was resoundingly defeated, and then to Pakistan, where he was given the difficult task of leading negotiations with Iran that failed to yield a deal. And just weeks after Mr. Vance announced that his next book would explore his conversion to Catholicism, he found himself defending Mr. Trump’s attacks on the pope.
Now Mr. Vance is also increasing his domestic political travel — making his first political trip to Iowa this month to help vulnerable incumbents in the state that kicks off the presidential nominating contest.
But he has also been on a more under-the-radar campaign trail at more than two dozen R.N.C. breakfasts, lunches and dinners that are estimated to have raised more than $60 million.
So there he was at the Four Seasons in Nashville to speak last month at a conference of the Rockbridge Network, a secretive Silicon Valley-inflected group of conservative donors that Mr. Vance co-founded. One of his supporters, Rebekah Mercer, the billionaire heiress, attended.
Or at fund-raising events on a farm in Tennessee, in Britain and at summer hot spots like Jackson Hole and Nantucket.
And he has quietly entertained donors over private meals at the Vice President’s Residence in Washington. In the fall, his cultivation campaign included Paul Singer, the hedge fund titan, a former skeptic he has grown close to.
Donors are willing to pay top dollar for time with a favorite to be next Republican presidential nominee. Joe Gruters, the chairman of the R.N.C., acknowledged that some people are donating because of Mr. Vance’s perceived presidential ambitions.
“In the vice president’s case, he is being mentioned for future office, and so people want to be able to start building that relationship,” he said in an interview. Mr. Gruters called the arrangement “a win for everybody,” saying Mr. Vance “has probably been the most successful finance chairman in the history of the party.”
An unusual role for a vice president
About a year ago Michael Whatley, who was then the R.N.C. chair, held a brainstorming meeting to game out how many events they would ask Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance to headline, according to two people familiar with the meeting.
Instead, they hit upon the idea of asking the vice president to oversee the finance operation entirely. Mr. Vance’s team jumped at the opportunity, and Mr. Trump later signed off.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, his first vice president, Mike Pence, raised money into his own PAC. But during the 2024 transition, Susie Wiles, the incoming White House chief of staff, and Mr. Vance spoke, and he agreed not to actively raise money for his own separate organization, according to four people with knowledge of the conversation.
Last May, Mr. Vance’s old PAC, Working for Ohio, entered an agreement with the R.N.C. that gives the PAC a 5 percent cut of all small-dollar online fund-raising, federal records and donation disclosures show. The PAC has been transferred $720,000 so far, which Mr. Vance has used to pay for firms of at least two of his advisers.
There are a few ways that donors can show their support for Mr. Vance. In his first year, Mr. Vance raised a record amount, nearly $5 million, for a foundation that helps manage the Vice President’s Residence at the Naval Observatory. And Ms. Vance has also begun to quietly raise money at events for a new childhood literacy nonprofit, the Amaryllis Foundation.
But the main way donors have been told they can register their early backing for Mr. Vance in 2028 is to contribute to the R.N.C. Tickets for his R.N.C. events usually go for $100,000 or $250,000, and each event is expected to raise at least $2 million.
The arrangement has allowed Mr. Vance to do some good for the party, and for himself. Mr. Vance is still a relative newcomer on the national scene — he won his first election less than four years ago, in a race where he faced significant skepticism from some major donors.
Hosts have been heavy on tech leaders, including Mr. Lonsdale, Keith Rabois, an early PayPal executive, and the podcaster Chamath Palihapitiya, whose event in Silicon Valley last May raised over $4 million and drew Google co-founder Sergey Brin, one of the world’s wealthiest people.
Mr. Vance remains close to Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist, co-founder of Palantir and his longtime mentor, who financed a $15 million super PAC for Mr. Vance in 2022. Mr. Vance and Mr. Thiel shared a meal at the Vice President’s Residence a few weeks ago, two people with knowledge of the event said.
Mr. Vance has been circumspect in discussing his plans with donors in these sit-downs, but many people in his orbit expect him to run and allies are quietly making preparations. Mr. Vance employs an aide, Chris Applegate, who oversees his donor relationships and advises the R.N.C., Rockbridge and the Residence.
Trying to win over skeptics
Mr. Vance hardly has the race locked up. Some major pro-Israel donors are skittish about his ties to people like Tucker Carlson, and have shared privately that they would prefer to back Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has more hawkish foreign policy views.
But Mr. Rubio, who ran for president in 2016 with the support of several Republican megadonors, has done little to cultivate major givers since he joined the Trump administration. He has suggested he would support Mr. Vance if he runs.
Mr. Rabois, who hosted Mr. Vance last month at his home in Miami Beach, said he had not made up his mind on whom he would back. “I would be ecstatic about either one of them being elected president of the United States,” he said.
Behind the scenes, Mr. Vance has worked to win over some of those skeptical, Rubio-friendly voices.
He has drawn close, perhaps surprisingly so, to one of the Republican Party’s top fund-raisers: Mr. Singer.
The hedge fund billionaire is well-known for being a prolific bundler of contributions, including for Mr. Rubio in 2015. Mr. Singer preferred other vice-presidential hopefuls to Mr. Vance in 2024. But after Mr. Vance was picked, aides to both men worked to bury the hatchet, and Mr. Vance and Mr. Singer connected on a call to move forward.
Mr. Vance and Mr. Singer, people close to both men said, talk regularly by phone and text. Mr. Singer recently contributed the maximum, $443,000, to the R.N.C. at Mr. Vance’s request.
Last October, Mr. Vance hosted more than 40 members of Mr. Singer’s donor network, the American Opportunity Alliance, at the Vice President’s Residence for breakfast, according to three people with knowledge of the gathering.
Mr. Vance has also developed a relationship with Miriam Adelson, the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson who strongly supports Israel and who spent over $100 million to boost Mr. Trump’s most recent campaign. He spent New Year’s Eve with Ms. Adelson and Ms. Vance at Mar-a-Lago, with the two women seated next to another and hitting it off, according to two people with knowledge of the hangout.
And he has cultivated ties with other billionaires including Elon Musk, Jeff Yass, Stephen A. Schwarzman and John Paulson. He invited Mr. Schwarzman to the Vice President’s Residence for dinner last year and attended a New York fund-raiser in February thrown by Todd Ricketts, a former R.N.C. finance chair who has advised Mr. Vance on the role. Mr. Vance regularly gives out his cellphone number to major donors.
Back to Rockbridge
As Mr. Vance began thinking about a career in politics, he started his own donor group, the Rockbridge Network, after a 2019 retreat with billionaires including Mr. Thiel and Ms. Mercer that was held in Rockbridge, Ohio.
Seven years later, the Rockbridge festivities at the Four Seasons in Nashville, observed by a Times reporter, could have been mistaken for a fledgling first gathering of a Vance national finance committee — for a presidential campaign that has yet to be launched.
Venture capitalists and energy executives arrived in black Suburbans and silver Cybertrucks under heavy security, and roamed the lobby, bar and restaurant. Among them were Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the crypto billionaires who have become two of the country’s biggest donors; Luke Nosek and Steve Jurvetson, a pair of tech investors close to Mr. Musk, and Alex and Zach Witkoff, the politically connected sons of Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East. Ms. Mercer embraced friends but declined an interview request when approached by a reporter.
Speakers included Kid Rock; Jake Paul, the Trump-friendly influencer; Dina Powell McCormick, a top executive at Meta, and Chris Buskirk, who co-founded Rockbridge with Mr. Vance and is a consultant to Mr. Trump’s main super PAC. Chris LaCivita, another Trump super PAC adviser, delivered an optimistic message about the midterms.
In an onstage interview with Mr. Buskirk, Mr. Vance said he was amazed at how Rockbridge had grown since its humble beginnings.
Mr. Vance reminisced to the 250 donors about a lavish fund-raiser he had helped organize at the San Francisco home of David Sacks, the entrepreneur, in June 2024, three people in the room recalled. Even that summer, Mr. Vance recalled, people in Silicon Valley might have found themselves facing divorce if they publicly came out as Trump supporters. Just a few months later, he said, supporting Mr. Trump did not require so much courage.
As for his own run? Mr. Vance did not say anything about his presidential aspirations as he spoke for 45 minutes on the highly produced, dimly lit, cosmic-themed fifth-floor ballroom stage. His presence said enough.
Theodore Schleifer is a Times reporter covering billionaires and their impact on the world.
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