As JD Vance walked on to the RNC convention floor to accept the party’s vice-presidential nomination on Monday, speakers lined up to lavish praise on his impeccable credentials.
But the Ohio senator and running mate of Republican White House candidate Donald Trump has previously said he feels “humbled” by the stellar CV of his wife, Usha Vance.
While she does not seek out the political spotlight, Mrs Vance, 38, wields considerable influence over her husband’s career, he has said.
In an interview on Fox News last month, Mrs Vance said: “I believe in JD, and I really love him, and so we’ll just sort of see what happens with our life.”
The two met as students at Yale Law School in 2013, when they joined a discussion group on “social decline in white America”, according to the New York Times.
The content influenced Mr Vance’s best-selling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, about his childhood in the white working-class Rust Belt, which became a 2020 movie directed by Ron Howard.
Mr Vance, 39, has said he considered her his “Yale spirit guide” when they were classmates at the elite university.
Mrs Vance previously graduated with a BA in history from Yale University and was also a Gates Scholar at Cambridge University, where she came away with an MPhil in early modern history, according to her LinkedIn profile.
The couple wed in 2014 and have three children: two sons, Ewan and Vivek, and a daughter, Mirabel.
Mrs Vance – née Chilukuri, the child of Indian immigrants – was born and raised in the suburbs of San Diego, California.
Her husband regularly rails about “woke” ideas he says are pushed by Democrats, but his wife was formerly a registered Democrat and is now a corporate litigator at a San Francisco law firm which proudly touts its reputation for being “radically progressive”.
Mrs Vance once clerked for Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court justice, on the District of Columbia court of appeals. Then she clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Both men are part of the highest court’s conservative majority.
“Usha definitely brings me back to Earth a little bit,” Mr Vance told the Megyn Kelly Show podcast in 2020. “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.”
“People don’t realise just how brilliant she is,” he added, saying she is able to digest a 1,000-page book in only a few hours.
She is the “powerful female voice on his left shoulder”, giving him guidance, he said.
As Mr Vance gears up for what is certain to be a gruelling campaign for the White House, he may need her counsel more than ever before.
