J.D. Vance, a newcomer to the Senate from Ohio, stood on the chamber floor in April and scolded his more experienced colleagues for their desire to continue backing Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression.
“Have we learned nothing?” Mr. Vance railed as the Senate debated a stalled military aid package to Ukraine, referring to the debacles of the Iraq War. “Have we updated nothing about our mental thinking, about the standard that we apply for when we should get involved in military conflicts?”
Mr. Vance, a Republican elected in 2022 and a strident opponent of assisting Ukraine, lost later that day when the Senate gave overwhelming bipartisan approval to tens of millions of dollars of assistance for Ukraine.
But that defeat helped position him for a real victory this week, when former President Donald J. Trump chose Mr. Vance, 39, as his running mate. In many ways, Mr. Vance’s short time in the Senate was a high-stakes audition for that post, where he showcased his willingness to break with Republican orthodoxy and his lawyerly ability to mount a public case for MAGA policies both at abroad and at home.
Mr. Vance has moved on to the national stage after an extraordinarily short time in the Senate — 18 months — during which some senators historically may not have even given their maiden speech on the floor.
It once would have been an unthinkable leap. Dan Quayle, who had served in the House and been re-elected to a second term in the Senate, was considered an unknown and untested quantity in 1988 when he was picked by George H.W. Bush as the vice-presidential nominee. But Barack Obama changed the standard in 2008 when he was elected president after just four years in the Senate. Mr. Vance is now looking to change it even more.
During his short tenure in the Senate, Mr. Vance has not established much of a legislative record; he is viewed by many of his colleagues as someone who has simply used the office to mount a campaign for vice president. But he has distinguished himself as an outspoken proponent of populist policies, supporting antitrust enforcement at home, promoting an isolationist foreign policy and positioning himself as a first line of defense against a Justice Department that he claimed was persecuting Mr. Trump.
In a memo to his Senate colleagues last October in which he pressed them to consider aid to Israel and aid to Ukraine as separate bills, rather than a combined package, Mr. Vance wrote: “Israel has an achievable objective; Ukraine does not.” He argued that “the United States does not have a plan in Ukraine, but we do have a plan in Israel.”
He was more direct in an interview with Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser. “I’ve got to be honest with you,” Mr. Vance told him, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”
Even Republicans who disagreed with him said there was no questioning his political talent.
“I told him, ‘You’re the intellectual conscience of the populist movement,’” Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, said on Tuesday, as he milled around Republican National Convention hall in Milwaukee. “Legislatively, he’s come up short; but he’s smart, he’s passionate but he’s not angry, he’s intellectual, his arguments aren’t just emotion.”
While Mr. Cramer supported sending aid to Ukraine, he made it clear he bore no ill will toward Mr. Vance, saying, “J.D. is always a joy to visit with.”
Publicly, that joy has been less visible. Early in his tenure, he threatened to block all nominations to the Justice Department until it stopped what he described as a “political prosecution” of Mr. Trump. He has baselessly accused President Biden of trying to “punish people who didn’t vote for him” by inundating the heartland with fentanyl.
Upon entering the Senate, Mr. Vance quickly aligned himself with a small but growing bloc of MAGA-leaning lawmakers like Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rick Scott of Florida.
They regularly challenged Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader, and other more mainline Senate Republicans not just over aid to Ukraine but a variety of issues, including overall spending and making deals with Democrats to keep the government open and suspend the federal debt ceiling to avoid a default.
Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Senate Republican who is seeking to succeed Mr. McConnell next year when he steps aside as leader, was careful in his language supporting Mr. Trump’s pick for a running mate, acknowledging that he has a different view of American power abroad.
“Trump picked someone who reinforces a lot of his views,” Mr. Thune, who vociferously backed aid to Ukraine, said in an interview in Milwaukee. “These are all debates we’re going to have if we’re successful in flipping the majority in the Senate. There will be some very interesting conversations in the future about economic policy and national security policy.”
When pressed on whether Mr. Vance’s selection was bad news for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Mr. Thune sighed and said he hoped it would not be.
“I come from a different school of Republican thought when it comes to that issue,” he said.
Other Senate Republicans without the same political ambitions to consider have been less charitable in the past about Mr. Vance.
“I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance,” Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, told his biographer, McKay Coppins, when Mr. Vance was running for Senate and the former Republican presidential nominee watched him undergo a political transformation to cozy up to Mr. Trump and the MAGA base. He said it was hard for him to even sit in the same room with Mr. Vance during the weekly closed-door Republican Senate lunch.
Mr. Vance faced his first significant Senate challenge just weeks into his term in February 2023 when a freight train hauling hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, threatening the health of some of his new constituents. He grabbed the spotlight and accompanied Mr. Trump to the community later that month as the former president assailed Mr. Biden’s response while the administration blamed Mr. Trump for loosening rail regulations.
The disaster also allowed Mr. Vance, a hard-right conservative, to demonstrate some willingness to work across the aisle. He crafted major rail safety legislation with Senator Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat facing a difficult re-election race this year. But the bill has stalled over objections from more senior Republicans who see it as too heavy on new railroad regulation and too generous to labor unions.
“He beat Sherrod Brown to the accident and immediately started taking on the railroad,” Mr. Cramer said. “He established his credentials as a populist right away.”
Mr. Thune, who stood in the way of the bill, said that Mr. Vance “does have some strongly held views that maybe aren’t always what other Republicans think in terms of philosophy toward business.”
“Some of the things they were trying to fix weren’t things that needed to be fixed,” he added, referring to the rail safety bill. “They were things that the unions wanted to see happen.”
Mr. Vance’s short time in the Senate has not allowed him to leave much of a mark. His Republican colleagues view him as remarkably ambitious, even by the standards of an institution known for unbridled ambition, and they describe him as very quick on his feet in discussions and debate. In the hallways, Mr. Vance has positioned himself as one of the more accessible members willing to hold court with journalists.
But some of his colleagues — even Trump loyalists from his home state — have suggested that his outspoken stances have been less about policy than politics.
“He’s a one-issue senator, and it’s all about Ukraine,” Representative Max Miller of Ohio, a former top adviser in the Trump administration, said in an interview in April, after he broke with the majority of House Republicans and voted to send $60.8 billion in aid to Ukraine. “He thinks this is his winning issue and topic to be the vice president and to gain more political power. I think he’s doing a good job, but his rhetoric is very dangerous and it is scary.”
When pressed about whether he might regret those words if Mr. Trump selected Mr. Vance as his running mate, Mr. Miller insisted he would not.
“If he picks J.D. Vance and he’s out of the Senate, it’s even better for somebody like me, so I wouldn’t hate it,” Mr. Miller added.
In a statement on Wednesday, he said: “Senator Vance and I may have a different opinion on one issue — Ukraine — but when it comes down to it, there are a lot of issues more important to the American people. He and I have the same vision for America.” Mr. Miller said he was proud the party was unifying.
Democrats believe he is a vulnerable foil on a host of issues, particularly abortion rights and his ties to technology industry leaders.
“Trump’s V.P. pick is great news for the wealthiest Americans and lousy news for everyone else,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said on a call arranged by Mr. Biden’s campaign after the selection of Mr. Vance was announced. “Billionaires on Wall Street and Silicon Valley are cheering, but there is no joy for working people.”
One thing Ms. Warren did not mention was that she had worked with Mr. Vance on a bipartisan measure that would claw back up to three years of compensation from bank executives in the event of a bank failure.
In an article in Politico, Ms. Warren remarked that Mr. Vance had been “terrific to work with.”
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