How ‘spirit guide’ Usha Vance boosted JD Vance’s meteoric rise

When JD Vance, a military veteran with a hardscrabble working-class background and a case of imposter syndrome, entered Yale Law School, he may not have seemed like someone destined to land a heartbeat from the US presidency.

Many of those who know him credit his remarkable success story to the influence of his wife, Usha Vance, whom he met on the Ivy League campus.

By any measure, JD Vance, 40, has had a meteoric rise. In a matter of three years, he has gone from a longshot run for the Senate, to becoming the third youngest vice-president in American history.

At his side every step of the way has been his “spirit guide”, as he calls her – wife, Usha.

At Yale Law School the pair were friends at first. Though they shared a reading group and social circle, their backgrounds could not have been more different.

Usha Vance, the 39-year-old daughter of Indian immigrants, grew up in the San Diego suburbs before attending Yale for both her undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Her husband was raised in Middleton, Ohio, born to a family with roots in the impoverished Appalachians of eastern Kentucky.

Their contrasting upbringings is what attracted them to each other, Charles Tyler, a Yale classmate and friend of the couple, told the BBC.

“They were always this match of very dissimilar people,” he said.

In his bestselling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, JD Vance recounted how his wife helped him adjust to life at the top law college.

“I have never felt out of place in my entire life,” he wrote. “But I did at Yale.”

The vice-president-elect described one instance in the book where his wife taught him which cutlery to use for which part of a formal meal, to pick the silverware from the outside in.

“Usha was teaching JD about the subtler aspects about being at an elite institution,” Tyler recalls. “Usha was his guide throughout the process.”

The book explores his firsthand experience of the poverty and addiction of a rural underclass, while offering a glimpse into the Vances’ relationship.

When JD Vance was unveiled as Trump’s running-mate in July, he had limited name recognition.

He was the junior senator from Ohio, elected to public office for the first time just two years earlier, after spells as a Marine, lawyer and venture capitalist.

She was a highly accomplished lawyer who had clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts at the Supreme Court and for appeals court judge Brett Kavanaugh, before he was appointed by Trump to the highest court in the land.

Usha Vance was a corporate litigator at prestigious firm Munger, Tolles & Olson in San Francisco and Washington DC, before stepping aside to help her husband run for vice-president.

The couple are “a team in every sense of the word”, Jai Chabria, a family friend and a political consultant, told USA Today.

“When he goes out and makes a great speech, she advises him, and gives him her opinion, and it’s taken seriously,” Chabria said.

Since her husband became Trump’s running mate, the mother-of-three has adopted a behind-the-scenes role.

Friends say she shuns the limelight in part because of her desire to shield their young children, age seven, four and three.

During the campaign cycle, Usha gave public remarks a handful of times, including when she sat for a Fox News interview and to introduce her husband at the party conference.

That speech offered the public perhaps the clearest insight to their marriage.

“It’s safe to say that neither JD nor I expected to find ourselves in this position,” she said.

In that address, Tyler said, she was most like the friend he still speaks to weekly.

“It feels extremely congruent with the person she is in life,” Tyler said.

From her speech, Americans discovered that JD Vance learned how to cook Indian dishes that accommodate his wife’s vegetarian diet, among other things.

And when the time came to defend her husband, she was ready to do that, too.

Last July, previous comments by JD Vance in which he called some Democratic politicians “childless cat ladies” resurfaced on social media, and it was his wife whose damage control seemed to do most to quell the ensuing uproar.

She described his remarks as a “quip”, reframing them as a reflection on the challenges facing working families in America, and expressing a wish that critics would look at the larger context of what her husband had said.

She acknowledged in the Fox interview that she does not agree with her husband on all political issues, though she said she has never doubted his intention.

“Usha has never been an overly political person,” JJ Snidow, a former Yale Law School classmate of the pair, told the BBC. “What America has come to see of her being a very impressive, reserved person is real – that is who she is.”

Charles Tyler says Usha Vance does not fit tidily into any political box.

“The reason so many people have difficulty characterising her politics is not because she keeps her cards close to the vest,” he says, “it’s because she doesn’t conform to the kind of ideological tribes that most of us have identified with.”

That will probably serve her well as US second lady, a role that has historically been removed from the cut-and-thrust of Washington’s partisan politics.

But with JD Vance’s star firmly in the ascent, few who know the power couple doubt that Usha Vance will continue to serve as his spirit guide, perhaps even one day as first lady of the United States.