The 50th vice president of the United States, JD Vance, has been described as a national conservative, right-wing populist, and an ideological successor to paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan. Vance describes himself, and has been described by others, as a member of the postliberal right. Vance has described himself as having been influenced by Catholic social teaching. He has endorsed books by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, and far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec.
On social issues, Vance is considered conservative. He opposes abortion, same-sex marriage, and gun control. He has taken a number of natalist positions. He has repeatedly expressed his belief that childlessness is linked to sociopathy. Vance has repeatedly asserted that parents should have more voting power than non-parents; however, in August 2024, he backtracked from that suggestion. He has proposed federal criminalization of gender-affirming care for minors. He supports Israel in the Gaza war. He opposes continued American military aid to Ukraine during the ongoing Russian invasion and prefers a negotiated peace. Vance has argued that the country's largest and most powerful institutions have united against the right and has called for "a de-woke-ification program". He is critical of universities, which he has called "the enemy". Vance is also critical of both the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In 2016, Vance was an outspoken critic of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, calling him "reprehensible" and himself a "never Trump guy". In 2021, after Vance announced his Senate candidacy, he publicly announced support for Trump, apologizing for his past criticisms of Trump and deleting some of them. That year, Vance advised Trump to fire all civil servants and replace them with Trump supporters. Vance has said that if he had been vice president during the 2020 presidential election, he would not have certified the results. Instead, Vance insisted that some states that Trump lost should have sent pro-Trump electors to Washington so that Congress could decide the election.
Social issues
Abortion Vance supported the Supreme Court of the United States overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and opposes abortion. In 2024, he said that abortion laws should be set by the states.
In September 2021, when asked whether abortion laws should include exceptions for rape and incest, Vance said, "two wrong[s] don't make a right." He said he preferred to frame the question as a matter of "whether a child should be allowed to live" rather than as what a woman is "forced" to do, also suggesting that the circumstances of rape and incest were "inconvenient". A month later, he said: "There's something comparable between abortion and slavery and that while the people who obviously suffer the most are those subjected to it, I think it has this morally distorting effect on the entire society." At a 2021 conference hosted by the Claremont Institute, Vance argued that companies support abortion rights because they are "so desperate for cheap labor that they don't want people to parent children".
In January 2022, Vance said: "I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally." In the same interview, he brought up a hypothetical situation where "Roe vs. Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion … then, you know, every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately black women to get them to go have abortions in California"; he said he was "pretty sympathetic" to the notion that "some federal response" would be required to stop that situation from happening, as he supported the idea that "Ohio bans abortion in California and the Soroses of the world respect it".
In February 2022, Vance called the "right to life" a priority for conservatives, and said of conservative politicians who are "not willing to stand on that issue, I think it indicates your character is weak and you don't have the fortitude to actually serve the interest of our voters." In an October 2022 debate, Vance said: "I've always believed in reasonable exceptions" to abortion bans. Later, he specified that he supported exceptions for rape, incest, and preserving a mother's life. Also that month, Vance said of abortion: "I'd like it to be primarily a state issue. Ohio is going to want to have a different abortion policy from California, from New York, and I think that's reasonable. I want Ohio to be able to make its own decisions, and I want Ohio's elected legislators to make those decisions. But I think it's fine to sort of set some minimum national standard." In November 2023, Vance said, "We can't give in to the idea that the federal Congress has no role in this matter".
In January 2023, Vance advocated for the U.S. Department of Justice to enforce the Comstock Act of 1873 to ban the mailing of drugs that induce abortion. In June 2024, the Supreme Court at least temporarily preserved access to mifepristone, after which Trump said during a debate that he "agree[d] with their decision" and would not "block" the drug. In July, a week before Vance was announced as Trump's running mate, Vance told NBC's Meet the Press that he likewise supported access to mifepristone.
Vance also signed a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra requesting the withdrawal of a privacy rule preventing law enforcement from accessing abortion related health records.
In August 2024, Vance was interviewed by Laura Ingraham, who brought up that suburban women are worried that abortion could be banned nationwide. He responded: "I don't buy that ... I think most suburban women care about the normal things most Americans care about right now." Vance also said that, if Congress passed a national abortion ban, Trump would and should veto it.
During the October 1, 2024 vice-presidential nominees' debate, Vance said he "never supported a national ban" on abortion, despite having said in 2022 that he "certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally" and pledging during his 2022 Senate campaign to "end abortion".
Family, childlessness, and divorce Vance has been called a natalist or pronatalist due to his strong support for the traditional nuclear family, the institution of marriage, and the importance of an active role for the state in encouraging and enabling family-formation and raising the national fertility rate.Multiple sources:
In 2019, Vance praised fatherhood for making "relatively driftless" young fathers "rooted and grounded", and praised parenthood for making people "more attached to their communities, to their families, to their country … we think babies are good because we're not sociopaths." In 2020, he expressed a concern that childlessness, "especially in America's leadership ... makes people more sociopathic" and makes the U.S. "a little bit less, less mentally stable [...] you go on Twitter and almost always the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don't have kids at home."
In March 2021, Vance argued that childless Americans should pay more taxes than Americans with children. His rationale for this was to "reward the things that we think are good" and "punish the things that we think are bad." In May 2021, Vance declared that people should "go to war against the anti-child ideology" in the U.S. while scorning "sad, lonely, pathetic" "millennial feminist writers" who focus on the benefits of childlessness and disappointments of parenthood. He mentioned his older sister, who had said: "maybe I should have delayed having kids. Maybe I should have went [sic] to school", to which Vance replied: "you've been a great mom. Your children are happy. They're healthy." Vance blamed "cultural messaging" for making his sister feel "inadequate".
In a July 2021 speech to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Vance blamed "the childless left" for America's woes, accusing it of lacking a "physical commitment to the future of this country." He also said: "Many of the most unhappy and most miserable and most angry people in our media are childless adults". The same month, in an interview with Sebastian Gorka, Vance called the Democratic Party a "childless cabal". He praised Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán for encouraging married couples to have children and said that parents should "get a bigger say in how democracy functions" than non-parents. He suggested achieving this by allotting "votes to all children in this country, but let's give control over those votes to the parents of the children", with the result that "non-parents don't have as much of a voice as parents", though he later said that this was a "thought experiment" rather than a policy proposal.
Later that month, Vance told Fox News that the U.S. was being "effectively run … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable", citing Democratic politicians Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He lamented that "we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it". Since 2021, this position has been met with criticism and support. In August 2021, Vance asked for political donations citing the issue of "radical childless leaders", saying the U.S. was "dominated by childless sociopaths" and childless people "don't have a direct stake in this country". In July 2024, he called his earlier "childless cat ladies" remark "sarcastic" but "true": "I've got nothing against cats … I'm making an argument that our entire society has become skeptical and even hateful towards the idea of having kids".
At a discussion organized by the Center for Christian Virtue in October 2021, Vance said that "many of the leaders of the left" are "people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children, that really disorients me and disturbs me ... Randi Weingarten, who's the head of the most powerful teachers' union in the country—she doesn't have a single child. If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone." Weingarten has two stepchildren. Vance made similar remarks in an interview with Breitbart News Daily that month, singling out "next-generation leaders" of the left, like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as people who have no children and "want to take our kids and brainwash them so that their ideas continue to exist in the next generation".
In September 2021, while speaking at Pacifica Christian High School in California, Vance discussed divorces being more prevalent compared to generations ago:This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that, like, "well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally—you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that's going to make people happier in the long term. ... And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I'm skeptical. But it really didn't work out for the kids of those marriages."Vice alleged that Vance "seemed to suggest that in some cases, 'even violent' marriages should continue." In response to Vice, Vance said that rates of domestic violence had "skyrocketed" in recent years due to what he called "modern society's war on families", although in recent decades, rates of domestic violence have decreased. A strategist for Vance called Vices characterization "extremely dishonest" and said it was "preposterous" to claim that Vance supports people staying in abusive relationships given that he was himself "the victim of domestic abuse when he was a kid".