Usha Vance profile: The former Democrat and daughter of Indian immigrants who coached husband before debate

Until recently an employee at a ‘radically progressive’ law firm, the Yale graduate could become Second Lady under a Trump administration

Just a decade ago, in deep-blue California, Usha Vance was a registered Democrat.
This week, the Yale Law School graduate has been deep in preparation-mode, coaching her Republican husband JD Vance ahead of his vice-presidential debate against Tim Walz.
It will be one of the highest-profile political clashes of the election campaign.
“Neither JD nor I expected to find ourselves in this position,” she said, with a hint of understatement, when she addressed the Republican National Convention (RNC) this year.
Until this year, Mrs Vance worked for a San Francisco law firm that boasts of its “radically progressive” values.
Friends told the Washington Post that she was “generally appalled” by Donald Trump and revolted by his actions on January 6 2021, when a violent mob stormed the Capitol.
Yet the high-achieving child of Indian immigrants will be elevated to Second Lady of the United States if Trump wins the White House this year.
Mr Vance has undergone a similar conversion, having reportedly compared Trump to Hitler before reinventing himself as a liberal-bashing junior senator for Ohio and a darling of conservative media.
Mrs Vance, née Chilukuri, was born in San Diego, California, to a marine molecular biologist and an aerospace engineer.
Like her parents, she excelled academically, studying history at Yale before heading to Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, where she studied early modern history.
She met her future husband at Yale Law School when they joined a discussion group on “social decline in White America”.
Mr Vance, whose entry to the elite law school had been less gilded, growing up with an alcoholic mother and joining the US Marines, would describe her as his “Yale spirit guide”.
“She instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask and she always encouraged me to seek opportunities that I didn’t know existed,” he wrote in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
Mrs Vance, who edited the Yale Law Journal, would advise Mr Vance on cultivating relationships with professors and honing his writing. At the RNC, the pair are reported to have gone through each other’s speeches before they addressed the crowd in Wisconsin.
She embarked on a high-flying legal career after university, working as a clerk for John Roberts, the Supreme Court chief justice, and Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump would eventually elevate from the District of Columbia court of appeals to the Supreme Court.
“I maybe get a little bit too cocky or a little too proud. I just remind myself that she is way more accomplished than I am,” Mr Vance told a podcast in 2020.
“People don’t realise just how brilliant she is.”
The couple married in 2014 and have three children, two sons, Ewan and Vivek, and a daughter, Mirabel.
Mrs Vance resigned from her role as a corporate litigator for the California-based law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson in San Francisco to “focus on caring for our family” in July. A spokesman described her as an “excellent lawyer”.
Since her husband was announced as Trump’s running mate, her ascent to the upper echelons of the Republican Party has not been all plain sailing.
Mrs Vance, a practising Hindu, and her children, have come in for racist abuse from the far-Right on social media.
While she has kept a relatively low profile on the campaign trail, she has occasionally emerged to soften her husband’s public image.
The Ohio senator has endured months of negative headlines since he joined the Republican ticket, after his comments about the country being run by “childless cat ladies” resurfaced.
Speaking to Fox News in August, Mrs Vance described the comments as a “quip” and tried to downplay them.
He would “never, ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family, who really, was struggling with that,” she said.