Usha Vance, wife of Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, has played the role of supportive husband on the campaign trail. Yet the lawyer has been subject to intense scrutiny: her professional career has been dissected, her image has been contrasted with that of other women in Donald Trump’s inner circle, and above all, there has been much speculation about her politics.

Usha Vance, who comes from a family of academics, has had a hugely successful career in law. She studied from the prestigious Yale Law School, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was an appellate judge and then clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts. She went to work as a trial attorney at Munger, Tolles & Olson, a position she left when her husband became Trump’s running mate.

The child of Indian immigrants growing up in a middle-class neighborhood in San Diego, she met her future husband at Yale. The couple married in 2014 and had three children.

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JD Vance has spoken highly of his wife. In a 2020 interview on Megyn Kelly’s podcast, he said, “I’m one of those guys who really benefits from having kind of a strong female voice over his left shoulder saying, ‘Don’t do that; do that.’” He added that she now serves as a guiding figure for him.

Her husband’s extreme views have become public knowledge, but Usha Vance’s politics have largely remained a question mark. The reporting shows that historically she has had a liberal or centrist orientation. According to The New York Times, she was not a registered Democrat until 2014. In July, The Washington Post reported that some of her friends and associates looked on in “disbelief” as she spoke at the Republican National Convention, where her husband was officially nominated as Trump’s running mate.

Usha Vance has joined her husband on the campaign trail, but she has largely avoided creating her own public persona. She has had only one media interview – with Fox News – since her husband’s appointment, in which she defended her husband’s derogatory comments about “childless cat ladies” as just a “joke.”

She has been the target of racist attacks from the right — including from white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who associated with Trump. Yet she has given no public indication that she does not support her husband’s political shift from conservative Never Trumper to next-generation torchbearer of the MAGA movement.

In her interview with Fox News in August, Usha Vance said she and her husband sometimes disagree on politics, but she has faith in his “intent.”

“We’re two different people – we have a lot of different backgrounds and interests and things like that,” she said. “So we keep coming to different conclusions. But that’s part of the fun of getting married. And what I never doubt about JD, even when I disagree, is his intent, what he really wants to do.