Usha Vance
Usha Vance, an accomplished attorney, has gained recognition both through her own professional achievements and as the wife of J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy” and a political figure. Usha, originally Usha Chilukuri, attended Yale Law School where she met J.D. Vance. She has built a distinguished legal career, working at prestigious law firms. The couple has balanced their careers while raising a family, and Usha has been a supportive partner in J.D.’s endeavors, including his ventures into politics.
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.
Early Life and Education
Career and Achievements
Awards and Recognition
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National Merit Award (2010)
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Africa’s Most Influential Women in Education (2015)
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Global Change Maker (2018)
Legacy and Impact
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.
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 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.”
