In just the past few years, J.D. Vance has undergone a full-scale MAGAmorphosis. The Ohio Republican once called himself a “Never Trump guy” and reportedly said the former president is either “a cynical asshole like Nixon” or “America’s Hitler.” But while campaigning for Senate and serving in office, Vance has steered dramatically to the right, arguing against including rape and incest exceptions in abortion bans, opposing sending aid to Ukraine, and advancing the unsubstantiated idea that the 2020 election was stolen.
On just about every issue, Vance has aligned himself with Trump and pushed policies that are diametrically opposed to the ones set forth by the Biden administration—except when it comes to tech.
A former venture capitalist, the Hillbilly Elegy author’s ties to the tech world run deep. He worked briefly for GOP megadonor Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital, before going on to join AOL founder Steve Case’s venture capital firm Revolution. In 2020, with backing from the likes of former Google chairman and Democratic megadonor Eric Schmidt, he launched his own Ohio-based VC firm focused on companies based in cities that are often overlooked by investors. The following year, he announced his bid for the Senate, flush with some $15 million from a Thiel-backed PAC. In his post on Truth Social announcing Vance as his pick, Trump touted his “very successful business career in Technology and Finance.”
But despite his extensive connections to the industry, Vance has emerged as one of Big Tech’s biggest critics in Congress, while also becoming a frequent proponent of policies that would build up technological capacity outside Silicon Valley. Though both sides would be loath to acknowledge it outright, this combination has at times made Vance an unlikely booster of parts of the Biden administration’s tech agenda, particularly around antitrust enforcement and broadband deployment.
Speaking at a tech forum in February, for instance, Vance commended Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, who many on the right have attacked for her forceful approach to antitrust law. “I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job,” said Vance, who is part of a small group of so-called Khanservatives in Congress, who agree with Khan that pricing shouldn’t be the only legal measure of whether a company’s anticompetitive behavior harms consumers. “She recognized there has to be a broader understanding of how we think about competition in the marketplace,” Vance said at the time.
And, like President Biden (and, well, former President Trump), Vance has also supported repealing Section 230, the law that shields online platforms from legal liability for their content moderation decisions and the content users post. (But while Vance wants to repeal the law because he believes platforms restrict too much speech, President Biden believes the law gives tech companies license to do too little.)
But the overlap between Vance’s tech agenda and the Biden administration’s doesn’t stop at concerns around Big Tech. It also extends to expanding tech access and development across the country. When the Senate first passed the bipartisan CHIPS Act in 2022, a signature accomplishment for President Biden that included a $52 billion investment in domestic semiconductor development, then-Senate candidate Vance praised the legislation on Twitter, even as other members of the Republican party panned the bill as “reckless spending.” “With the passage of the CHIPS Act, the Senate took an important step to ensure these products are made in America by American workers,” Vance said at the time.
More recently, Vance attempted to salvage the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), another Biden-era initiative that gave low-income households up to $30 a month to pay for internet access. As funding for the program was running out, Vance cosponsored a bipartisan, bicameral bill to pump $7 billion into ACP. When that bill stalled, Vance was part of a group that attempted to include funding for the program in another must-pass bill in May. Echoing the White House’s own statements on the program, Vance, from the Senate floor, urged his colleagues to continue funding the ACP, though they ultimately declined to do so. “Disabled people choosing between food and Internet connection—that is the choice that we have foisted upon them by not authorizing this program,” Vance said in his remarks.
None of this makes Vance some middle-of-the-road moderate. Even if he once was, those days appear to be long gone. On Monday, the Biden campaign was eager to highlight the stark differences between the two presidential tickets. “Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people,” Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement.
But the alignment between Vance and Biden on tech issues speaks to the extent to which both parties have embraced economic populist policies related to technology—policies that favor the regulation of big businesses and the reshoring of critical technology supply chains.
Of course, tech policy does not make or break elections. Tech money, on the other hand, certainly helps. And even before his announcement as Trump’s vice presidential pick, Vance was working his network in Silicon Valley to build bridges between its emerging class of conservative political donors and Trump. Those same donors, including venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya, both of whom recently hosted a fundraiser for Trump in San Francisco, have met the announcement of Vance as Trump’s running mate with elation. “A Bestie adjacent as the VP?!?!?!” Palihapitiya posted on X on Monday, along with emojis of a bicep and a fist bump.