Do we like JD Vance?
Our score: 2 out of 10. trans people's rights and climate action, with a real service record that doesn't balance it out.
James David Vance was born in 1984 in Middletown, Ohio, and was raised in large part by his grandparents, whom he called Mamaw and Papaw. He enlisted in the Marines straight out of high school, served as a combat correspondent from 2003 to 2007 including an Iraq tour, then did Ohio State and Yale Law. His 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy has sold more than 3 million copies, and it's the book that made him a name.
The twist is the Trump flip. In 2016 he wrote that he went “back and forth” between seeing Trump as a Nixon-style cynic and as “America's Hitler”, called himself a never-Trump guy, and later deleted tweets calling Trump “reprehensible”. By 2021 he was telling Fox “I regret being wrong about the guy”. He was sworn in as a senator in 2023 and as vice president in January 2025.
Now the harm check, and it's the big one. Vance introduced the Protect Children's Innocence Act, which would ban gender-affirming care for trans youth, and said “Under no circumstances should doctors be allowed to perform these gruesome, irreversible operations.” He also proposed the Passport Sanity Act to limit passport markers to male or female, opposes the Equality Act, and said he'd vote no on the Respect for Marriage Act. That's LGBTQ Nation's account, a critical outlet, but the bills and quotes are his.
On the planet and migrants, it's more of the same. In 2020 he said “we of course have a climate problem in our society”; by 2022 he'd voiced doubt that humans drive climate change, scored zero with the League of Conservation Voters, and introduced a bill to repeal the federal EV tax credit. On migration, PolitiFact rated his claim that the country was “flooded” with 30 million illegal immigrants Mostly False.
Facts are a recurring problem. PolitiFact's page lists 36 checks of his claims: 18 False, 4 Pants on Fire, 9 Mostly False, and only 3 rated True or Mostly True. The latest, dated 19 October, rated False his claim at a CBS town hall that about 20 per cent of refining capacity went offline under Biden.
Iran is the other sore spot. In a 2024 podcast he said “Our interest, I think very much, is in not going to war with Iran.” After the 2026 strikes he defended them on Fox, while also posting that Trump won't drag the US into a years-long conflict with no clear objective. TPM reported he went quiet on X and postponed a CBS town hall, which did eventually air on 17 October.