Ohio Senator JD Vance weaved his Kentucky roots into his speech accepting the Republican nomination for vice president Wednesday night, declaring that he will ultimately be buried in the commonwealth.
The 39-year-old Vance, tapped by former President Donald Trump earlier this week to be his running mate, said that the people of eastern Kentucky represent “the source of America’s greatness.”
Vance has long touted his ties to Kentucky, noting that his great-grandmother had a home in Jackson, Ky., as he referenced in his national best-selling book, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
On Wednesday, he brought up Kentucky at the close of his speech, recalling what he told his wife, Usha, when he proposed to her.
“Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law school debt and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in eastern Kentucky,” he said. “And I guess standing here tonight it’s gotten weirder and weirder, honey.”
He called the cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky part of his family’s ancestral home and where he would eventually be laid to rest.
“Like a lot of people we came from the mountains of Appalachia … Now that’s Kentucky coal country, one of the ten poorest counties in the entire United States of America,” Vance said, describing Breathitt County. “They’re very hard-working people and they’re very good people. They’re the kind of people who would give you the shirt off their back even if they can’t afford enough to eat.”
Leaning into the idea that America is more than an idea, Vance described the deep national pride that people in Appalachia carry in their bones.
“Our media calls them privileged and looks down on them. But they love this country, not only because it’s a good idea but because in their bones they know this is their home … That is the source of America’s greatness,” Vance said. “That is a homeland, that is our homeland.
“People will not fight for abstractions but they will fight for their home.”
Vance, a Yale graduate and former Marine who was an initial acerbic critic of Trump, would become the first millennial vice president in history if elected.
The Biden campaign said Vance carries an agenda that “puts extremism and the ultra wealthy over our democracy.”
“An agenda that cuts health care, bans abortion, slashes Social Security and Medicare and is a rubber stamp for Donald Trump to become a dictator on day one and terminate our Constitution as he wishes,” said Biden spokesman Michael Tyler.
The Kentucky Democratic Party blasted Vance for “exploiting the very people he claims to champion.”
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