Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), former President Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, has an economic policy vision that is unorthodox for Republican candidates aiming for the White House.
The 39-year-old senator has held elected office for about a year and a half but has carved out uniquely populist economic positions on Capitol Hill, many that are in line with Trump’s embrace of protectionism and trade policies designed to reinvigorate the country’s manufacturing industry.
Vance, who would be one of the youngest vice presidents in modern history, has been known to break the fiscal conservative mold when it comes to senators. Trump announced his choice of Vance on Monday afternoon at the kickoff of the 2024 Republican National Convention.
Here are a few of Vance’s unique economic policy stances.
Trump altered the course of Republican trade policy during his first term, imposing tariffs on China and elsewhere. He has also indicated that his second-term trade policy would go even further, with the former president floating the idea of 10% across-the-board tariffs. Trump has also toyed with the idea of reducing the income tax and replacing it with tariffs.
Vance, who represents the Rust Belt state of Ohio, has a trade vision largely aligned with Trump. He supports boosting the country’s manufacturing sector through the use of tariffs. He has also pushed back on the premise that tariffs are inherently inflationary, defending them during a May interview with CBS News.
“If you apply tariffs, really what it is is you’re saying that we’re gonna penalize you for using slave labor in China and importing that stuff in the United States,” Vance said. “What you end up doing is you end up making more stuff in America, in Pennsylvania, in Ohio, and in Michigan.”
Republicans have traditionally been adversarial regarding labor unions, but Vance, known for his blue-collar bona fides, has taken a very different public tack.
In fact, Vance drew headlines last year when he visited a picket line of striking autoworkers. The visit came during contentious negotiations between the United Auto Workers and the “Big Three” automakers, Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis.
“Great to visit the auto workers striking in Toledo this morning,” Vance said at the time. “They’re in high spirits and have a simple message: good wages for an honest day’s work. I’m proud to support them.”
“This isn’t about politics,” he added. “For many years, the auto workers took it on the chin to enable the industry to retool, reinvest, and thrive. Today, the industry is doing well and the workers should get a slice of the pie.”
Vance has been part of the growing GOP support for larger child tax credits as a way to support families.
Vance expressed some support for recent bipartisan legislation to boost the child tax credit alongside business tax provisions after the bill passed the House, although the legislation never got a Senate vote.
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (known informally as the Trump tax cuts) doubled the child tax credit, increasing it to $2,000 for qualifying families and doubling the estate, or death, tax exemption. That allowed people to keep more of their inheritance before being hit by federal taxes.
Republicans have long courted corporate support and, in years past, have been seen as stalwart defenders of corporate America. Vance, though, has been critical of the country’s biggest corporations, particularly Big Tech, and has been a proponent of antitrust enforcement.
Vance even praised President Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chairwoman, Lina Khan, the leader of what is known as the “hipster antitrust” movement, a school of thought that ditches the consumer welfare standard that guided U.S. antitrust policy for decades in favor of a much more adversarial approach to corporations that also considers other factors, such as corporate concentration and income inequality.
“A lot of my Republican colleagues look at [Khan] … and they say, ‘[Khan] is engaged in some sort of fundamentally evil thing,’” Vance said at a Bloomberg and Y Combinator event earlier this year. “I guess I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration who I think is doing a pretty good job.”
Vance has also gone after some corporations for perceptions that they are “woke” or have liberal biases. In February, he even called for Google to be broken up.
“Long overdue, but it’s time to break Google up,” he said on social media. “This matters far more than any other election integrity issue. The monopolistic control of information in our society resides with an explicitly progressive technology company.”
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The announcement that Vance would serve as Trump’s running mate came just days after the former president was grazed by the bullet of a would-be assassin at a political rally in Pennsylvania. Trump on Monday received enough votes at the RNC to cinch the Republican presidential nomination. He is slated to address the RNC on Thursday.
Trump and Vance will face Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election. Trump has been consistently polling ahead of Biden at the national level and in key battleground states.