Ohio Sen. JD Vance, a Republican who has come after “left-wing domination” in colleges and universities and criticized schools for “CRT indoctrination,” will be former President Donald Trump’s running mate in the 2024 election.
Trump announced that he was picking the first-term senator to occupy the vice presidential slot on the 2024 Republican ticket on Monday, July 15, the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and just two days after a gunman attempted to assassinate Trump at a rally in Butler, Pa.
Before his 2022 election, the senator was best known for writing Hillbilly Elegy, a 2016 book chronicling his experience in growing up in rural Appalachia. Many looked to the book after Trump’s election later that year to better understand his appeal among the white working-class.
In his year-and-a-half serving in the U.S. Senate, Vance has used his platform to target affirmative action in college admissions; diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in both K-12 schools and higher education; what he’s characterized as “left-wing domination” of universities; and China’s influence in colleges.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote that he chose Vance because of his experience serving in the U.S. Marine Corps and his understanding of the “hardworking men and women of our Country.”
Vance has focused much of his education-related legislative activity on colleges and universities, but he has echoed conservative rhetoric surrounding K-12 schools. On his 2022 Senate campaign website, Vance went after schools for their COVID-19 policies and accused them of teaching critical race theory.
“As we saw from the radical Left’s culture war waged during COVID-19 and the continued CRT indoctrination in our kids’ schools, it’s clear that we should never let politics drive public health decisions and deprive our kids of a good education,” Vance wrote.
In a June 2024 tweet, Vance called for outlawing DEI policies nationwide, saying that “DEI is racism, plain and simple.”
His education focus today is markedly different from that of seven years ago when Vance first entered the public sphere.
In 2017, in the weeks before Trump took office and in the months following the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance told Education Week that the then-incoming administration should focus on training students in high-demand jobs to help grow the middle class.
“Recognize that so many of the next generation of jobs require training and skills that we’re not necessarily preparing our kids for now,” Vance said.
A focus on higher education
In his short time in the Senate, Vance has sponsored three education-related bills, all of which are specific to higher education.
In legislative language, they mimic much of the conservative rhetoric surrounding K-12 schools and state-level K-12 policymaking. One bill would establish stricter requirements for colleges and universities contracting with or accepting donations from “foreign entities,” which he said would help keep the Chinese Communist Party from “exerting financial influence over American educational institutions.” Throughout this legislative session, conservative lawmakers in Congress have raised concerns that Chinese language and culture programs that receive Chinese government funding, like the Confucius Institute, are covertly influencing K-12 schools and colleges and universities.
The second bill would prohibit public colleges and universities from employing undocumented immigrants by taking away federal funding. And the third, which he introduced before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in colleges and universities, would have established an office of the inspector general for unlawful discrimination in higher education. Vance also sent a letter to the presidents of 10 universities after the Supreme Court ruling accusing them of being “openly defiant” toward the ruling because they had expressed opposition to and disappointment with it.
In an interview with The European Conservative in February, Vance criticized colleges and universities for “left-wing domination” and called for a “much less biased approach to teaching.”
K-12 bills show support for hunting programs, cellphone bans
Vance has signed onto six education bills as a co-sponsor, four of which affect K-12 schools. None have advanced through the Senate or been considered in the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee.
Two came in response to a provision in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that a bipartisan group of lawmakers claimed had the unintended consequence of threatening school hunting, archery, and sharp shooting programs because the law—a sweeping bill passed in 2022 after the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting—prohibited schools from using federal funds to purchase “dangerous weapons.”
The two bills Vance co-sponsored would have altered that language to allow schools to purchase weapons for use in hunting, archery, and sharp shooting programs. Those bills, however, ultimately weren’t needed because a similar bill in the U.S. House of Representatives became law.
Vance also co-sponsored a bill targeting cellphone use in schools. The bill would direct Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to study the use of mobile devices in K-12 schools and establish a pilot program for a grant that would support schools in creating a phone-free environment.
Another piece of legislation he signed onto was a bipartisan bill that would have directed the Department of Health and Human Services to provide grants for schools to expand student access to defibrillators.
