2024 ELECTION VANCEONOMICS: WHAT TRUMP'S VP PICK COULD MEAN FOR BUSINESS

J.D. Vance first caught the public’s attention with his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, a populist howl about Appalachia that accuses elites of betraying the white working class.

- JEFF JOHN ROBERTS

Since then, Vance has cultivated some of the wealthiest elites in tech and venture capital—including former Google chairman Eric Schmidt and the billionaire VC Peter Thiel—to help him win a U.S. Senate seat and, in July, the Republican nomination for vice president.

With Donald Trump’s ticket on the rise, observers in the business community may well wonder what approach Vance will bring if voters put him in the White House. Will it be a radical populist agenda? Or will Vance deliver on the priorities of his well-heeled friends in Silicon Valley? It’s too soon to say, of course. But based on his record, Vanceonomics seems indifferent or even hostile to the traditional business priorities—such as laissez-faire industrial policy and easy access to goods and labor—that have been the bedrock of the Republican Party’s platform for over a century.

In the ordinary course of things, there would be little interest in the views of the vice president—a position its first occupant, John Adams, described as the “most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived.” But 2024 is no ordinary election. Vance would be a proverbial heartbeat from the presidency under a chief executive who would turn 83 in the final year of his term. And Trump’s desire to cultivate a new generation of MAGA leaders suggests that he may give Vance a broad remit to pursue his own agenda—in part to set him up as his heir in 2028.

“This is one of those few times where, like Dick Cheney, the vice presidential beat will be worth covering,” says David Wessel, former economics editor at the Wall Street Journal, who now directs a fiscal policy center at the Brookings Institution.