Many Republicans have welcomed Usha Vance, the Indian American wife of vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, as a symbol of generational change and growing diversity in the party ranks.
Usha, 38, a corporate lawyer who used to be a registered Democrat, is the daughter of Indian immigrants and a practicing Hindu.
Danny Willis, 25, chair of Delaware Young Republicans, said: “With this ticket, with the show of diversity in what would be the second gentleman and second lady of the United States, I’m extremely proud to be a Hispanic male and a Republican.”
Usha has a very different story to tell from the last Republican second lady, Karen Pence, a white grandmother and devout Christian from Indiana who was an elementary school teacher and watercolour artist.
She is the daughter of Krish and Lakshmi Chilukuri, who hail from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and later settled in California. Krish is an engineer and university lecturer; Lakshmi a biologist and college provost. They are part of a tight-knit community of Indian American academics in suburban San Diego.
Usha recalled in a recent Fox News interview: “I did grow up in a religious household, my parents are Hindu, and I think that was one of the things that made them such good parents, that make them really very good people.”
Even as a child, Usha seemed a stranger to self-doubt. In a 2022 profile in the New York Times, Vikram Rao, a family friend who works in Silicon Valley, was quoted as saying: “By age five or six, she had assumed a leadership role. She decided which board games we were going to play and what the rules were going to be. She was never mean or unkind, but she was the boss.”
The same Times article noted that, between 2007 and 2010, “Usha posted 65 ‘read’ books to her Goodreads account, including novels by Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as nonfiction by Nina Burleigh and Nicholas Kristof. Then her account went dormant for six years.”
Usha met JD Vance at Yale Law School, where together they organised a discussion group on “social decline in white America” – a theme he would return to in his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy.
The book chronicles his upbringing in a poor Appalachian family and the start of his relationship with Usha, played in a 2020 Netflix film adaptation by Slumdog Millionaire star Freida Pinto.
The couple did not seem an obvious match but, in Hillbilly Elegy, JD praises Usha as a “Yale spirit guide” who helped him negotiate campus life. “She instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask, and she always encouraged me to seek opportunities that I didn’t know existed,” he wrote.
For her part, Usha once told NBC News: “We were friends, and I liked that he was very diligent. He would show up at 9am appointments that I would set up for us to start working on the brief together.”
Among the pair’s Yale Law classmates was businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination this year.
Usha served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal and managing editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Technology and took part in classes offering free legal advice on supreme court and media freedom issues.
She also gained a master’s in philosophy from the University of Cambridge. Her final project focused on “the methods used for protecting printing rights in seventeenth-century England”, according to her biography on the university’s website.
JD and Usha married in an interfaith ceremony in Kentucky in 2014. That same year, she clerked on the influential DC circuit for Brett Kavanaugh, who would be nominated by Donald Trump and confirmed to the US supreme court in 2018.
Usha was also a law clerk to supreme court chief justice John Roberts during the 2017-2018 term. During that term, Roberts wrote a 5-4 ruling upholding Trump’s travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries.
At the 200-lawyer firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, Vance, an associate, focused on civil litigation and appeals. The firm – which calls itself “radically progressive” – has counted Berkshire Hathaway, Bank of America, and PG&E among its clients. Usha’s own clients there included a division of the Walt Disney Company and the Regents of the University of California.
Usha was a registered Democrat who voted in that party’s primaries as recently as 2014, public records show, but she voted in the 2022 Republican primary when her husband was a Senate candidate for Ohio.
Last month the couple were interviewed by Fox News at their home in Cincinnati, Ohio, about the possibility of JD becoming Donald Trump’s running mate. Usha said: “I don’t know that anyone is ever ready for that kind of scrutiny. I think we found the first campaign that he embarked on to be a shock. It was so different from anything we’d ever done before. But it was an adventure.
“And so I guess the way that I put it is, I’m not raring to change anything about our lives right now. But I really, you know, believe in JD, and I really love him. And so we’ll just sort of see what happens with our lives.”
On Monday, as JD entered the Republican national convention hall and members of the Ohio delegation chanted his name, Usha was at his side. She has proved to be an anchor at such moments.
Related: From anti-Trump to vice-president nominee: JD Vance in his own words
“Usha definitely brings me back to earth a little bit, 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,” JD told the Megyn Kelly Show podcast in 2020. “I’m one of those guys who really benefits from having, like, a sort of powerful female voice on his left shoulder saying: ‘Don’t do that, do do that’ — it just is important.”
Usha said in a statement late on Monday that she is resigning from the firm to support her family – they have two sons, six-year-old Ewan, four-year-old Vivek, and a daughter, Mirabel, who is two. A Munger spokesperson said Usha had been an “excellent lawyer and colleague”.
Republicans at the convention praised the Vances but some were unwilling to weigh in on what they perceive as identity politics. Virginia Zemel, 66, from Downers Grove, Illinois, said: “You don’t look at the person’s skin colour and ethnicity. It’s the character of the person and what they stand for.
“America started as a melting pot and we include everybody. President Trump’s leadership, first lady Melania Trump and his wonderful family, and now JD Vance as vice-president and his wife and family will be a message to bring the strength of our country back.”
But some political analysts believe that, less than four months before election day, Usha’s arrival could be an asset on an otherwise all-white Republican ticket.
John Zogby, a pollster and author, said: “Second lady candidates hardly ever figure into the mix. However, Indian Americans are rising in influence in the United States. They’re heavily Democratic – or at least they have been – in their voting patterns so if there’s an opportunity to chip away at that and even get a small percentage that could be vital and especially in those swing states that everybody talks about.”
He added: “It’s good optics, she’s a smart lady and anything that could swing a few voters could be thunderous in an election like this.”
