J.D. Vance, a conservative commentator, entrepreneur, and author, has won the Ohio GOP Senate primary. Former president Trump’s endorsement helped Vance overcome six opponents, including billionaire Neil Patel and former state treasurer Josh Mandel. In November, he will compete against Democrat U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan to succeed retiring Sen. Rob Portman.
I’m incredibly honored to have President Trump’s support. He was an incredible fighter for hard working Americans in the White House, he will be again, and I’ll fight for the America First Agenda in the Senate. https://t.co/s3d3JhTgBC
The memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” by Vance is his best-known work. In 2020, Netflix released the movie adaptation. “A passionate and personal critique of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans” is how one reviewer sums up Vance’s novels. According to goodreads.com, Vance “tells the genuine narrative of what a social, geographic, and socioeconomic decline feels like when you were born with it wrapped around your neck.”
In a state Trump easily won in 2016 and 2020, Vance, who was “formerly a vociferous critic” of Trump, “now poised to become the MAGA standard-bearer,” according to Axios. It will be intriguing to watch if Trump’s support will enable him to take the Senate seat.
Equally intriguing will be to observe if Vance gains support among Indian Americans in the state as a result of his wife. Usha Chilukuri Vance, an attorney, is married to Vance. According to Chilukuri’s Facebook page, the couple has been married since 2014. Three children—two boys and a girl—were born to the couple.
According to her LinkedIn page, Chilukuri is an associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP. She concentrates on “complex civil litigation and appeals in a wide variety of areas, including higher education, municipal government, entertainment, and technology,” according to her bio on the firm’s website. She collaborates with the San Francisco and Washington, D.C. offices of the legal firm. According to public documents on the State Bar of California website, she has had a licence to practise law in California since June 2016, according to heavy.com.
Chilukuri claimed that she and Vance first connected in a 2017 interview with NBC News, while they were both Yale law students. She claimed that part of what drew her to Vance was his upbeat demeanour. She told Megyn Kelly that “he felt really different.”
Chilukuri attended Mt. Carmel High School while growing up in San Diego, California. She relocated to the East Coast for college, graduating from Yale University with a history bachelor’s degree in 2007. She was a Gates Cambridge Scholar in 2009 and pursued a Master of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. According to her profile on the program’s website, her MPhil research “investigated the tactics employed for safeguarding printing rights in seventeenth-century England” and she concentrated on “the career of John Field, a printer who operated between 1642 and 1668 in London and Cambridge.”
Later, Chilukuri went back to Yale to earn her law degree. She worked as the managing editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Technology and the executive development editor of the Yale Law Journal while she was a student.
Her LinkedIn page states that she worked as Chief Justice John G. Roberts’s clerk. She worked as a clerk at the District of Columbia Circuit of the US Court of Appeals earlier. She worked for Brett Kavanaugh, a former judge who was inducted into the Supreme Court in 2018. From 2013 to 2014, Chilukuri worked as a law clerk for Judge Amul Thapar in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.
The Cinemaholic observed that in “Hillbilly Elegy,” which Vance wrote, “Usha helped him recognise that he carried baggage from his difficult background even after he managed to achieve all his aspirations,” in an article on the Vances published in November 2020. He said that she had told him that he had no concept how to settle a dispute. He noted that he was afraid of taking after his mother, but Usha had shown him that all he needed to do was talk to her in order to convince her of his point of view.
