Blitz Bureau
WITH the selection of JD Vance as the Vice President candidate of the Republican Party, media reports have started focussing on his wife Usha Vance. While she does not seek out the political spotlight, Ms Vance, 38, wields considerable influence over her husband’s career.
The two met as students at Yale Law School in 2013, when they joined a discussion group on “social decline in white America”, according to the New York Times.The content influenced Mr Vance’s best-selling 2016 memoir ‘Hillbilly Elegy’, about his childhood in the white working-class Rust Belt, which became a 2020 movie directed by Ron Howard.
Yale Spirit Guide
Mr Vance, 39, has said he considered her his “Yale spirit guide” when they were classmates at the elite university. Ms Vance graduated with a BA in history from Yale University and was a Gates Scholar at Cambridge University, where she came away with an M Phil in early modern history, according to her LinkedIn profile. The couple wed in 2014 and have three children.
Ms Vance – née Chilukuri, the child of Indian immigrants – was born and raised in the suburbs of San Diego. She was formerly a registered Democrat and is now a corporate litigator at a San Francisco law firm. Ms Vance once clerked for Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court justice, on the District of Columbia court of appeals. Then she clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Both men are part of the highest court’s conservative majority.
“Usha definitely brings me back to Earth a little bit,” Mr Vance told the Megyn Kelly Show podcast in 2020. “And if I maybe get a little bit too cocky or a little too proud I just remind myself that she is way more accomplished than I am.”
