Profile
Who is
Usha Vance, the Indian American lawyer married to JD Vance?
The lawyer
who was once a registered Democrat has been welcomed by Republicans as a sign
of generational change
David Smith
in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Wed 17 Jul
2024 12.00 CEST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/17/who-is-usha-vance-jd-vance-wife
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 the 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 the 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 the 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.
“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.”
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