WASHINGTON — Senator JD 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 that seeks to guide the economy toward advancing socially conservative goals, even as those policies challenge 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 conservative social causes, along with his growing anger at the role big business plays in shaping American society and politics.
Vance built his brief political career on this new kind of economic populism.
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He has championed efforts to reward families for having children, with tax incentives that some Republican economists say discourage people from working. He has also pushed to weaken big business, especially the technology companies that Vance and his allies say have used their market power to silence conservatives and harm workers and children, through support for 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 knew Vance and discussed policy with him for years, long before he decided to enter politics.
“Economic policy is in service of this broader social vision, where you don’t have to go to college to earn a middle-class salary,” Strain said. “Where your kids are safe from tech companies. And where these large companies, run by elites, are not a threat to local companies.”
Since taking office in 2023, Vance has supported raising the minimum wage for people permitted to work in the United States, cast doubt on the virtues of corporate tax cuts, and privately expressed admiration for some of the economic positions of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Calif. – Mass., a liberal Democrat, whom he joined to promote legislation to crack down on big banks. He also called Lina Khan, chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, whose aggressive antitrust agenda has angered business groups and many Republicans, one of the few Biden administration officials who is doing “very good work.”
A critic of trade agreements and a supporter of tariffs and other policies that seek to protect American industry from competition, Vance wants to recreate small-town American communities oriented around factories and populated by 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 last month in Virginia. “They can work in an industrial 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 arithmetic, not the indoctrination of crazy progressives.”
Some of Vance’s positions, such as support for taxes on imports and promises to help native workers by deporting millions of immigrants, reflect the former President’s populist positions. donald trumphis running mate.
Others, such as support for stronger antitrust regulation and skepticism about tax cuts, constitute breaks with Trump, even if they stem from the same vision of an America harmed by globalization. In a statement, Luke Schroeder, Vance’s spokesman, said the senator supported Trump’s economic agenda, including his tax cuts and deregulation measures.
“Only President Trump will set the economic agenda for his second term,” said Schroeder.
Over the years, Trump and traditional pro-business Republicans have established a fragile truce. While tariffs sickened traditional conservatives, deep tax cuts and sweeping deregulation still kept them comfortable with Trump’s economic vision for the party. Vance’s rise up the ticket has some old-guard Republicans wondering whether the party’s frayed consensus is crumbling.
“His views on issues like antitrust and even some tax policies represent a seismic shift in party orthodoxy. It’s safe to say there has been some apprehension,” said Ken Spain, a Republican consultant.
The opinions were also praised by some progressives, although they acknowledged that Vance remains an outlier among conservatives. “I don’t think his views are consensual in the Republican Party,” said Matt Stoller, a leading advocate for stronger antitrust enforcement and director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project. “And how he navigates it will be an interesting challenge, but it’s an earthquake on the Republican side.”
Some top Republican donors, including hedge fund mogul Kenneth Griffin and media mogul Rupert Murdoch, lobbied Trump against choosing Vance, The New York Times reported. Among Murdoch’s media outlets 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 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 political adviser on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, has had a relationship with Vance for years, and one of Vance’s political advisers previously worked with Cass at American Compass. Cass is now an outspoken critic of Republican tax cuts, arguing that they are fiscally irresponsible and largely serve corporate interests.
Trump has not embraced this view. He promised to extend expired tax incentives for companies contained in the tax overhaul he signed in 2017 and further reduce the corporate income tax rate, from 21% to 15%.
Cass is a regular target of scorn from other figures on the right. Some conservatives deride Cass, Vance and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, as “pro-life socialists.” Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax group led by Grover Norquistcreated an online quiz titled “Who Said That, 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 views on taxes. Vance signed off on Norquist’s pledge against tax increases 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 they use their money to finance radical anti-American movements.”
In any case, Norquist and other Republicans said Vance’s views should not have much influence in a second Trump administration.
“President Trump is the one who will set the policy and I have not heard President Trump talk about increasing the corporate tax rate. He would like to take him down,” said Michael Faulkender, chief economist at the America First Policy Institute and a former Treasury Department official in the Trump administration.
Trump pointed to that reasoning during an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago on Wednesday, saying vice presidential picks have no bearing on the election. “You’re voting for me,” he said.
Trump’s comments came after close scrutiny of Vance’s previous remarks criticizing prominent Democratic politicians as “childless babes” and suggesting that people without children should pay higher taxes. Although Vance has since walked back those remarks, he suggested that the tax comment was simply a reference to the child tax credit, which reduces taxes for those who report having children.
There is broad support for the child tax credit in Congress, even if Republicans and Democrats like it for different reasons. Democrats consider expanding the child tax credit a key tool to combat 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 pillar of a conservative, family-oriented social vision.
Still, certain child credit expansions have drawn opposition from conservative intellectuals and Senate Republicans, who this week blocked a bipartisan bill to expand corporate tax incentives and increase the child tax credit. (Vance was not present at the vote.) Opposition largely centers on concerns that expanding child credit could discourage parents from working, instead giving them government support—a classic Republican complaint in politics. Supervisor.
Vance and his allies supporting these child credit expansions are “much less concerned about disincentives to work,” said Scott Winship, director of the Center for Social Mobility and Opportunity at the American Enterprise Institute. “They want to ride the populist wave; they want to place themselves firmly in the pro-natalist camp, and all of this argues for more generous payments to families with children.”
During his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last month, Vance appeared to acknowledge that the party was about to debate its economic views, including his own.
“My message to my fellow Americans, those watching from all over the country, is: shouldn’t we be governed by a party that isn’t afraid to debate ideas and come up with the best solution?” he said.
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