Where JD Vance stands on key issues: Abortion, guns, Ukraine and more

J.D. Vance, who was selected on Monday as former president Donald Trump’s running mate, once panned Trump’s promises as a kind of “opioid of the masses.” After rising to prominence as the author of the 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” - which chronicled his difficult upbringing in a steel mill community in Ohio - Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022. Vance, 39, has moved on from the “Never Trump” camp to embracing Trump and his populist style.

Now that the Ohio freshman will be on Trump’s ticket, his policy positions are likely to come under greater scrutiny. Here’s what to know.

Abortion

Vance has described abortion as “the first political issue I can ever remember caring about” and has equated abortion with murder. The Susan B. Anthony List, an antiabortion group, gave Vance an “A+” score based on his Senate record and said he “has voted consistently to defend the lives of the unborn and infants.” Last year, Vance opposed Issue 1, a ballot measure to enshrine reproductive rights into Ohio’s constitution, which passed in the Republican-controlled state last year with over 56 percent of votes.

The Biden campaign has sought to remind voters of comments Vance made in 2021, when he was asked whether abortion laws should include exceptions for rape and incest, and answered that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” In 2022, during a debate in the Senate race, Vance said he does believe in “reasonable exceptions.” After the passage of Issue 1 in Ohio, Vance wrote in a post, “as Donald Trump has said, ‘you’ve got to have the exceptions.’ … This is not about moral legitimacy but political reality.” In that same debate, Vance said he was “totally fine” with “some minimum national standard” to restrict abortion after a certain number of weeks, though he did not specify how many.

Gun control

The National Rifle Association praised Vance’s record on gun rights. Vance has rejected calls for tougher gun laws and dismissed a Democrat-led effort to ban bump stocks, which allow semiautomatic rifles to fire hundreds of bullets per minute, as “a huge distraction.” In 2022, Vance said he favored abolishing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which enforces federal gun laws.

Vance said in 2022 that he owns a rifle and passed a background check to buy it.

Immigration and the border

Vance supports stricter immigration policies as a way to protect U.S. security and the labor market - specifically for native-born workers. Vance, who introduced a bill last year designed to crack down on illegal visa overstays, has previously blamed migration through the southern border for driving up housing costs and driving down wages for U.S. workers. He previously said Republicans should push for funding to finish construction of the southern border wall, a controversial Trump initiative.

On Monday, Vance told Fox News he believes the United States should deport some of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country - “You start with the most violent people, the people who have criminal records,” he said - and dissuade migrants from coming to the United States by making it difficult for them to work.

The economy

When it comes to a range of policy issues - including unions, antitrust, trade and taxes - Vance has suggested a break with the Republican Party’s economic orthodoxy of the last several decades, as The Washington Post has reported.

As senator, Vance embraced a more active role for government intervention in the economy than most Republicans, praising President Biden’s antitrust crusader at the Federal Trade Commission, calling for a higher minimum wage, and even calling for raising taxes on corporations. Vance has also been an ardent defender of Trump’s aggressive trade proposals, including for tariff hikes on imported goods.

[JD Vance as VP nominee unnerves GOP’s business elite but thrills populists]

As Trump’s running mate, Vance is likely to march in lockstep behind the former president’s economic agenda, which features more traditional conservative policies such as tax cuts and is heavily favored by big business groups.

Election integrity

Vance has echoed the false claims made by Trump about widespread fraud in the 2020 election, and expressed doubts about the integrity of the electoral process.

Vance, in February, suggested that he would have taken a different path than former vice president Mike Pence, who presided over the congressional certification of the election results in January 2020. Vance said if he had been vice president, he would have allowed Congress to consider fraudulent slates of pro-Trump electors.

Vance hedged when asked by NBC recently if he would unequivocally accept the results of the 2024 election. “So long as it’s a free and fair election,” Vance responded, “of course we will.”

Ukraine and Israel

Vance is a longtime skeptic of Washington’s support for Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia, arguing that the United States cannot sustain its support for a war with no clear endpoint - and that European countries could carry more of the burden.

“I certainly admire the Ukrainians who are fighting against Russia, but I do not think that it is in America’s interest to continue to fund an effectively never-ending war in Ukraine,” he said in a May speech. In the Senate, he opposed the $95 billion national security bill that included security provisions for Kyiv, arguing in a February letter that the legislation could keep a future Trump administration from withdrawing its support.

Vance has argued that the United States should support Israel’s war in Gaza, arguing that Hamas’s military capabilities should be dismantled as quickly as possible in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack. In May, he suggested that providing Israel with precision-guided weaponry would reduce Palestinian casualties.

Health care, and gender-affirming care for minors

Vance has said he would protect funding for Medicare and supports allowing its administrators to negotiate prescription drug prices with manufacturers. “It’s just preposterous how much our seniors … are paying for their prescription drugs,” Vance told AARP while running for Senate in 2022. He has also argued that American companies and pharmacies should be able to purchase drugs from overseas to lower prices.

Vance has staunchly opposed gender-affirming health care for minors. Last year, he introduced a Senate bill that sought to criminalize those who provided puberty blockers, hormonal treatments or surgical interventions to minors as part of gender-affirming treatment. “Under no circumstances should doctors be allowed to perform these gruesome, irreversible operations on underage children,” he said in a statement.

Climate change and energy

Vance has described himself as a supporter of clean energy, while expressing skepticism over the role humans have played in causing climate change. “I’m skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man,” he said at a debate in 2022 while running for Senate. “It’s been changing for millennia. However, I absolutely want us to have clean energy.” In the same speech, he criticized wind turbines in Ohio for being “ugly” and not producing enough energy.

In an interview immediately after his vice-presidential nomination was announced, Vance suggested the United States could achieve energy “dominance” by boosting its exploitation of domestic fossil fuel resources. “We’re sitting on the ‘Saudi Arabia of natural gas’ in Ohio and Pennsylvania,” he told Fox News.