WASHINGTON — Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, the Republican vice presidential nominee, is a pioneer in what friends and critics alike call a new form of Republican economic thinking. It’s a vision to steer the economy toward advancing socially conservative goals, even when those policies defy conservative orthodoxy about government intervention in private markets.
Those who know him well say Vance’s economic views have evolved to match his deepening commitment to social conservative causes, along with his growing anger at the role large companies play in shaping American society and politics.
Vance has built his brief political career on that new brand of economic populism.
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He has championed efforts to reward families for having children, with tax breaks that some Republican economists say discourage people from working. He has also pushed to disempower large businesses, particularly tech companies that Vance and his allies say have used their market power to silence conservatives and hurt workers and children, through support for aggressive antitrust enforcement and even some corporate tax increases.
“He’s a social conservative first,” said Michael R. Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington who has known Vance and discussed policy with him for years, well before he decided to enter politics.
“The economic policy is in service of this broader social vision, where you don’t have to go to college to earn a middle-class wage,” Strain said. “Where your kids are safe from the tech companies. And where these big businesses, run by elites, are not a threat to local companies.”
Since taking office in 2023, Vance has supported raising the minimum wage for people authorized to work in the United States, cast doubt on the virtues of corporate tax cuts and privately expressed admiration for some of the economic stances of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a liberal Democrat, whom he has joined to push legislation cracking down on big banks. He has also called Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission chair whose aggressive antitrust agenda has angered business groups and many Republicans, one of the few Biden administration officials who is doing a “pretty good job.”
A critic of trade deals and supporter of tariffs and other policies that seek to protect American manufacturing from competition, Vance wants to re-create small-town American communities oriented around factories and populated with large families.
“I want to grow up and I want my children to grow up in a country where they can work a good job whether they went to college or didn’t go to college,” he said at a rally last month in Virginia. “They can work in a manufacturing economy where we make things with our own hands, and we do it with American workers. I want my children to grow up in a world where they go to school, and they learn reading, writing and arithmetic, not indoctrination from crazy progressives.”
Some of Vance’s positions, such as support for taxes on imports and promises to help native-born workers by deporting millions of immigrants, mirror the populist positions of former President Donald Trump, his running mate.
Others, such as support for stronger antitrust regulation and skepticism of tax cuts, are breaks from Trump, even if they stem from the same vision of an America hobbled by globalization. In a statement, Luke Schroeder, a spokesperson for Vance, said the senator supported Trump’s economic agenda, including his signature tax cut and deregulatory moves.
“President Trump alone will set the economic agenda of his second term,” Schroeder said.
Over the years, Trump and traditional pro-business Republicans had settled into a fragile truce. While tariffs nauseated traditional conservatives, deep tax cuts and far-ranging deregulation still kept them comfortable with Trump’s economic vision for the party. The elevation of Vance on the ticket has some old-guard Republicans wondering if the party’s threadbare consensus is tearing apart.
“His views on issues like antitrust, and even some tax policies, represent a seismic shift in party orthodoxy. It’s safe to say there’s been some apprehension,” said Ken Spain, a Republican consultant.
The views have also drawn praise from some progressives, although they acknowledge that Vance remains an outlier among conservatives. “I don’t think that his views are the consensus in the Republican Party,” said Matt Stoller, a leading proponent of more vigorous antitrust enforcement who is the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project. “And so how he navigates that is going to be an interesting challenge, but it’s an earthquake on the Republican side.”
Some major Republican donors, including hedge fund magnate Kenneth Griffin and media mogul Rupert Murdoch, lobbied Trump against choosing Vance, The New York Times has reported. Among Murdoch’s media properties is The Wall Street Journal, whose conservative editorial board has long been a standard-bearer for free-market, low-tax conservatism.
Of particular concern to more orthodox conservatives are Vance’s ties to intellectuals such as Oren Cass, chief economist at American Compass, a think tank at the vanguard of the so-called New Right. Cass, who was a top policy aide on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, has had a relationship with Vance for years, and one of Vance’s policy advisers previously worked with Cass at American Compass. Cass is now a sharp critic of Republican tax cuts, arguing they are fiscally irresponsible and they largely cater to corporate interests.
Trump has not embraced that view. He has promised to extend expiring tax breaks for businesses contained in the tax overhaul that he signed in 2017 and to further lower the corporate income tax rate, to 15% from 21%.
Cass is a regular target of scorn from other figures on the right. Some conservatives privately deride Cass, Vance and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., as “pro-life socialists.” Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax group led by Grover Norquist, created an online quiz titled “Who Said It, Oren or Warren?,” asking readers to attribute statements to either Cass or Warren, a staunch progressive.
But Norquist said in an interview that he was not worried about Vance’s views on taxes. Vance signed Norquist’s pledge against raising taxes during his 2022 Senate race, even as his now-defunct Senate campaign website included a call to “raise taxes on companies that ship jobs overseas and use their money to fund anti-American radical movements.”
In any case, Norquist and other Republicans said Vance’s views shouldn’t have much bearing on a second Trump administration.
“President Trump is the one who will set the policy, and I have not heard President Trump talk about raising the corporate tax rate. He would like to take it down,” said Michael Faulkender, chief economist at the America First Policy Institute and a former official in the Treasury Department under Trump.
Trump pointed to that reasoning during an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago on Wednesday, saying that vice presidential picks have no bearing on the election. “You’re voting for me,” he said.
Trump’s comments came after scrutiny of Vance’s previous remarks criticizing prominent Democratic politicians as “childless cat ladies” and suggesting that people without children should pay higher taxes. Although Vance has since walked back those remarks, he has suggested that the tax comment was simply a reference to the child tax credit, which reduces taxes for filers with children.
There’s broad support for the child tax credit in Congress, even if Republicans and Democrats like it for different reasons. Democrats see expanding the child tax credit as a key tool for fighting poverty. For Vance and other Republicans like him, provisions such as the child tax credit are part of a broader “pro-natalist” project encouraging women to have more children — a key plank of a family-oriented, conservative social vision.
Still, certain expansions of the child credit have drawn opposition from conservative intellectuals and from Senate Republicans, who blocked a bipartisan bill to extend business tax breaks and increase the child tax credit this week. (Vance was not present at the vote.) The opposition largely centers on concerns that the expansion of the child credit could discourage parents from working by giving them government support instead — a classic Republican complaint in tax policy.
Vance and his allies who support those child credit expansions are “much less concerned with the work disincentives,” said Scott Winship, director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility. “They want to ride the populist wave; they want to put themselves firmly in the pronatalist camp, and that all argues for more generous payments to families with kids.”
During his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last month, Vance seemed to acknowledge that the party was in for a debate over its economic views, his included.
“My message to my fellow Americans, those watching from across the country, is: Shouldn’t we be governed by a party that is unafraid to debate ideas and come to the best solution?” he said.
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