WASHINGTON — Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, the Republican vice presidential nominee, is a pioneer in what friends and critics call a new form of Republican economic thinking. It is a vision of steering the economy toward socially conservative goals, even when those policies defy conservative orthodoxy about government intervention in private markets.
People who know him well say Vance’s economic views have evolved to better align with his growing commitment to socially conservative causes, and he has also become increasingly angry about the role big business plays in shaping American society and politics.
Vance has built his short political career on that new form 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 break up big corporations, particularly tech companies that Vance and his allies say have used their market power to silence conservatives and harm workers and children, by backing aggressive antitrust enforcement and even some corporate tax increases.
“He is first and foremost a social conservative,” said Michael R. Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, who has known Vance for years and discussed policy with him long 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 make a middle-class wage,” Strain said. “Where your kids are safe from the tech companies. And where these big companies, run by elites, are not a threat to local businesses.”
Since taking office in 2023, Vance has supported raising the minimum wage for people eligible to work in the United States, cast doubt on the benefits of tax cuts for corporations and privately expressed admiration for some of the economic positions of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a liberal Democrat, with whom he has joined to push legislation to crack down on big banks. He has also named Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission whose aggressive antitrust agenda has angered business groups and many Republicans, as one of the few Biden administration officials who is doing a “pretty good job.”
Vance is a critic of trade agreements and advocates tariffs and other policies that protect American industry from competition. He wants to recreate America’s small-town communities, centered around factories and large families.
“I want to grow up, and I want my children to grow up, in a country where they can have a good job, whether they went to college or not,” he said at a rally in Virginia last month. “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 learn to read, write, and do math, not indoctrination by crazy liberals.”
Some of Vance’s positions, such as support for taxes on imports and promises to help native-born workers by deporting millions of immigrants, reflect the former president’s populist views Donald Trumphis running mate.
Others, such as support for tougher antitrust regulation and skepticism about tax cuts, represent a break with Trump, even if they stem from the same vision of an America hobbled by globalization. In a statement, Luke Schroeder, a spokesman for Vance, said the senator supported Trump’s economic agenda, including his signature tax cuts and deregulation measures.
“President Trump will be the sole determiner of the economic agenda for his second term,” Schroeder said.
Over the years, Trump and traditional pro-business Republicans had settled into a fragile truce. While tariffs made traditional conservatives queasy, deep tax cuts and sweeping deregulation kept them satisfied with Trump’s economic vision for the party. Vance’s elevation to the ticket has some old-guard Republicans wondering whether the party’s tenuous consensus is unraveling.
“His positions on issues like antitrust and even some tax measures represent a seismic shift in party orthodoxy. It’s fair to say there’s been some concern,” said Ken Spain, a Republican consultant.
The positions have also drawn praise from some progressives, though they acknowledge that Vance remains an outlier among conservatives. “I don’t think his positions are the consensus view in the Republican Party,” said Matt Stoller, a leading advocate of stronger antitrust enforcement who is director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project. “And how he does that will be an interesting challenge, but it’s an earthquake on the Republican side.”
Several top Republican donors, including hedge fund magnate Kenneth Griffin and media mogul Rupert Murdoch, lobbied Trump not to pick Vance, The New York Times reported. Murdoch’s media properties include The Wall Street Journal, whose conservative editorial board has long been a standard-bearer for free-market, low-tax conservatism.
Of particular interest to more orthodox conservatives are Vance’s ties to intellectuals like Oren Cass, chief economist at American Compass, a think tank at the forefront of the so-called New Right. Cass, who was a top policy adviser on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, has had a longtime relationship with Vance, and one of Vance’s policy advisers previously worked with Cass at American Compass. Cass has become a sharp critic of the Republican tax cuts, arguing that they are fiscally irresponsible and largely cater to corporate interests.
Trump has not embraced that position. He has promised to extend the expiring tax breaks for corporations included in the tax overhaul he signed in 2017 and to further reduce the corporate tax rate, from 21% to 15%.
Cass has been a frequent target of scorn from other figures on the right. Some conservatives privately mock Cass, Vance and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., as “pro-life socialists.” Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax group led by Grover Norquistcreated an online quiz titled “Who Said It, Oren or Warren?” asking readers to attribute statements to Cass or Warren, a staunch progressive.
But Norquist said in an interview that he wasn’t concerned about Vance’s positions on taxes. Vance signed Norquist’s pledge not to raise taxes during his 2022 Senate race, even as his now-defunct Senate campaign website included a call to “raise taxes on corporations that move jobs overseas and use their money to fund anti-American radical movements.”
Regardless, Norquist and other Republicans said Vance’s views should not have much impact on a second Trump administration.
“President Trump is the one who is going to set policy, and I haven’t heard President Trump talk about raising corporate taxes. He’s keen to cut them,” said Michael Faulkender, chief economist at the America First Policy Institute and a former Treasury Department official under Trump.
Trump made that argument during an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago on Wednesday, saying the choices of vice presidential candidates have no bearing on the election. “You vote for me,” he said.
Trump’s comments came after scrutiny of Vance’s previous remarks in which he criticized prominent Democratic politicians as “childless cat ladies” and suggested that people without children should pay higher taxes. Although Vance has since retracted those comments, he has suggested that the tax comment was simply a reference to the child tax credit, which lowers taxes for taxpayers with children.
There is broad support for the child tax credit in Congress, though Republicans and Democrats favor it for different reasons. Democrats see expanding the child tax credit as an important tool for fighting poverty. For Vance and other Republicans like him, provisions like the child tax credit are part of a broader “pro-natalist” project that encourages women to have more children — a key component of a family-centered, conservative social vision.
Still, some of the child tax credit expansions have drawn opposition from conservative intellectuals and from Republicans in the Senate, who this week blocked a bipartisan bill that would have extended tax breaks for businesses and increased the child tax credit. (Vance was not present for the vote.) Much of the opposition has focused on concerns that expanding the child tax credit could discourage parents from working by giving them government help instead — a classic Republican complaint about tax policy.
Vance and his allies who support child credit expansions are “far less concerned about the work disincentive,” 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 position themselves firmly in the pronatalist camp, and all of that speaks to more generous payments to families with children.”
During his speech at the Republican Party convention last month, Vance appeared to acknowledge that the party was heading into a debate over its economic positions, including his own.
“My message to my fellow Americans, to those watching from across the country, is: Shouldn’t we be governed by a party that is not afraid to discuss ideas and come to the best solution?” he said.
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