Will JD Vance bring more populism to Trump's economic agenda?

JD Vance has billed himself as a champion of the working class.

Some have called the vice president-elect “Trumpier than Trump.”

Like President-elect Donald Trump, whose appeal with working class voters got him elected twice as president, Vance has supported protectionism by stifling foreign competition on trade and immigration. That policy translates to higher tariffs and other barriers on imported goods and restrictions on immigration.

But unlike Trump, the former Republican senator from Ohio also has supported traditionally liberal agenda favorites such as a child tax credit and increasing minimum wage and opposed further corporate tax cuts. He’s praised President Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission head for antitrust enforcement and embraced trade unions − even walking a picket line − a move that puts him closer to liberal lawmakers such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a longtime friend, says that as a senator, Vance was more of a populist and nationalist on economic issues than Trump.

“JD is heavily interested in improving the wages of working-class Americans,” he said. “That seems to be a big focus of his, and I think that animates a lot of the specific policy positions that he takes.”

Vance has never been a darling of the traditional free-market conservatives that dominate the Republican party. So will he be able to push economic policy ideas alien to the Republican orthodoxy as well as ones not currently aligned with Trump? Will his two years in the U.S. Senate give him an edge as he sells Trump’s economic agenda to congressional Republicans and even some Democrats?

Vance is widely seen as an heir apparent to Trump given that the 78-year-old president-elect is only eligible to serve one term. Experts and people close to Vance say that while he might have some influence on Trump’s thinking, his agenda will not differ from his boss’s outlook. They also point to the fact that Trump did not have a policy director during his campaign and that he likes to oversee the economic portfolio himself.

Vance, 40, shot to fame as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir set in his hometown of Middletown, that lays bare the plight of white working-class Americans “in an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope.” The book was seen by many as an explainer-of-sorts of the 2016 election victory of Trump and a window into his voter base in the rust belt and elsewhere.

Strain expects Vance to be a big contributor to the administration's priorities and policies -- and he doesn’t expect the two of them to be at odds.

“At least not publicly,” he said.

That’s no surprise to Doug Holtz-Eakin, who was the chief economist in former President George H.W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers and served as director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office during former President George W. Bush’s term.

“Presidents’ agendas dominate, vice presidents adapt to the president's agenda,” he said.

However, Vance would have some opportunity to influence Trump through the power of his personality and reasoning, Holtz-Eakin said.

“But he's going to have to make the case that it's in his political interest,” he said.

Trump also is “increasingly cognizant” of Vance being his successor and of the need to set him up to succeed, according to Holtz-Eakin.  “And giving him a victory on policy issues is one way to do that,” he said.

Vance, whose father walked out on the family when he was a toddler and whose mother was dealing with drug addiction, was primarily raised by his working-class grandparents in Middletown, about 30 miles north of Cincinnati. Vance enlisted in the military directly out of high school joined the Marines and worked as a military journalist from 2003 to 2007. He graduated from Ohio State University and went on to obtain a law degree from Yale Law School.

Vance, who went on to pursue a career in the tech industry as a venture capitalist, has written and spoken passionately about the sense of hopelessness and the lack of economic opportunity among the white working class in the rust belt contending with shuttering steel mills and mines.

He has described himself as a member of the “postliberal right,” which rejects both the progressive left and its emphasis on individual rights as well as economic liberalism that favors a free market. The movement favors economic nationalism, which is in sync with Trump’s America First policies.

Vance, an economic populist, has spoken up against free trade and foreign military intervention.

“Jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war,” he said in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in July. “Our country was flooded with cheap Chinese goods, with cheap foreign labor … From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnating wages, the people who govern this country have failed and failed again.”

After Vance was elected senator from Ohio in 2022, he distinguished himself with his willingness to work across the aisle.In 2023, he collaborated with former Democratic Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown to cosponsor bipartisan legislation on railroad safety after the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and worked with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on a bill to claw back executive pay when banks fail.

“Vance is not an orthodoxy guy. He is a heterodox thinker. He doesn't have an intellectual paradigm,” says Holtz-Eakin. “It's really a hodgepodge of economic policies that he supports and that's a trend on the Republican side right now.”

The newly-minted Republican Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno, who unseated Brown in the 2024 election, sees Vance’s time in the Senate as a major asset.

“What he brings to the vice presidency is a combination of a fresh set of eyes, a new way of thinking with a deep understanding of how the institution works,” says Moreno. “Because he was there, but he wasn't there long enough to be corrupted by it.”

But to be clear, the captain of the ship and the person steering the ship is Trump, said Moreno.

"JD is the first mate," he said. "Like Trump, he's an outsider to the political world. So they're not burdened by, to use a Kamala Harris line, by what has been."

That's a sentiment Holtz-Eakin agrees with. He pointed to the appointment of Andrew Ferguson to lead the Federal Trade Commission. Ferguson is expected to be more lenient on American companies when it comes to mergers and acquisitions than the current head, Lina Khan, whom Vance had praised.

"Trump's already sort of gone the other direction on the antitrust issue," he said, offering it as evidence of the limited scope of influence anyone can have on Trump.

Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a White House Correspondent for USA TODAY.