With an eye on the future of a Republican Party dominated by Donald Trump and his legions of MAGA supporters, the 78-year-old former president in July named Ohio’s now 40-year-old Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate. The GOP’s national ticket.

The former president decided to split the Republican Party ticket with one of his top supporters in the Senate and a former Trump critic who has transformed into a leading America First disciple.

Vance grew up in a working-class family in a small town in southwestern Ohio. He enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps after graduating from high school and served in the Iraq War.

Vance, a former venture capitalist and author of the bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy” before running for elective office, is from Ohio, a state the former president comfortably carried in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

But the first-term lawmaker — who was elected to the Senate just two years ago — is on a mission to expand the Republican ticket among blue-collar voters, especially in the Rust Belt, who might otherwise support the Democratic Party ticket .

Trump said in appointing Vance that the senator would be “deeply focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American workers and farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota and far beyond.”

During the selection process for the Republican Party’s vice presidential candidate, Vance had an important ally in Donald Trump Jr.. The former president’s eldest son and popular surrogate in the MAGA world is a close friend of Vance.