Usha Chilukuri Vance, an Indian-American lawyer, has come into the spotlight after her husband, JD Vance, was chosen by former President Donald Trump as his running mate for the 2024 presidential elections. Born and raised in San Diego, California, to Indian immigrant parents, Usha married Vance in 2014. The couple met at Yale Law School in Connecticut.
Usha was born and raised by Indian immigrant parents in San Diego, California and married Vance in 2014. She is a practicing attorney with an expertise in litigation and was working at a law firm called Munger, Tolles and Olson. According to ABC News, Usha resigned from her position after Vance announced on July 16 that he will be running for Vice President.
Notably, Usha clerked for present US Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was serving as an appeals court judge. A judicial clerk in the US is a full-time assistant to the judge. They undertake legal research and are responsible for drafting memoranda and court opinions, proofreading, checking citations and more. It ,may be recalled that in 2018, Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault by four women in total, on of whom later recanted her allegations.
In an interview to Fox News alongside her husband, Usha said, “I don’t think people really understand how hard he [JD Vance] works or how creative he is. Everything he says and does is built on a foundation of so much thought.” In the interview she also opened up about her religious identity and Vance’s Christian faith saying, “I did grow up in a religious household. My parents are Hindu and I think that’s what made them such good parents. It made them very good people. So I’ve seen the power of that in my own life.” Usha said this in response to being asked why she’d been supportive of Vance when according to him, he had struggled with his own Christian faith in the past.
Usha’s Hindu identity will now likely be seen as an attempt to consolidate the Indian-American vote bank who are supportive of the BJP’s Hindu majoritarian politics in India, behind Trump. Trump continues to enjoy popularity in India too among the BJP’s vote base. However, it’s also interesting to note that according to The New York Times, during her Gates Fellowship at Cambridge, Usha “moved in mostly liberal and left-wing circles.”
Trump’s choice of JD Vance as his running mate is viewed as a calculated move to court the traditional battleground or ‘swing’ states of the American ‘Rust Belt’ that have historically included Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio Indiana and Pennsylvania.
The former president’s 2016 victory was secured with large support from white working-class voters from this important industrial belt in the US. Vance himself shot to fame in the same year after the publication of his book Hillbilly Elegy that describes his ‘blue-collar’ upbringing and its influence on his political views.
But it is also to be recalled that the rhetoric of both Trump and his support base particularly in the Midwest was racist and xenophobic, appealing almost exclusively to the troubles of white people from working class backgrounds.
Interestingly, when Vance was interviewed by Politico in 2016, here’s what he had to say: “The Trump people are certainly more racist than the average white professional, but it doesn’t strike me that this is the 1950s. There is a certain amount of racial resentment, but it’s paired with economic insecurity, and a willingness to believe Trump and a lot of the things that he says, despite evidence that a lot of it isn’t true. I really worry if this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.” The interview itself was titled ‘What’s going on with America’s white people?’.
It appears to US political analysts that Trump expects the elections to come down to how the Midwest and its swing states will vote. Ohio used to be considered the “archetypal swing state”, the London School of Economics note in their official blog post. In 2004 it was the “most contested” state, they note, with then presidential candidates Geroge W Bush and John Kerry visiting the state 41 times and spending “tens of millions of dollars in winning the state’s 20 electoral votes”. Again in 2008 Barack Obama and John McCain visited the state 50 times and spent almost $50 million in advertising.But in both 2016 and 2020, Ohio came out a Republican stronghold. It is now largely being considered a safe state for the party.
Meanwhile, pollsters predict that Biden cannot hope for a re-election without winning in another important swing state–Pennsylvania–where Trump is leading opinion polls and where he was shot at and injured during a rally earlier this month. Biden won Pennsylvania with a narrow popular vote share of 50.01% compared to Trump’s 48.84% in 2020. Whereas in 2016, Trump won Pennsylvania with 48.18% compared to Hilary Clinton’s 47.46%.
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