Usha Vance helped husband J.D. Vance chart his political path

In 2013, two students at Yale Law School decided to organize a discussion group on the subject of "social decline in white America".

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">One ​​of them was J.D. Vance, currently a Republican candidate in Ohio for a U.S. Senate seat.

For to him, the subject was intensely personal: he had grown up in an economically deprived area of ​​Ohio, and was raised largely by his grandparents while his mother struggled with addiction.

He had lived the material.

The other student behind the project was Usha Chilukuri, the child of Indian immigrants, from a ethnically diverse suburb of San Diego. For her, the social decline of white people was perhaps an intellectual interest - but it was a special interest. She was then Mr. Vance's girlfriend, now his wife, known as Usha Vance.

The band's playlist, according to e- emails reviewed by The New York Times, included academic articles such as "Appalachia's Urban Children: An 'Invisible' Minority in City Schools." The program would become something like the theoretical backbone of Mr. Vance's bestselling 2016 memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy," which opposes the social ills of the white working class in the post-industrial Midwest.

On paper, the gregarious Mr. Vance and the reserved Ms. Chilukuri might not have looked like they were in good shape. But, according to contemporaries at Yale Law School, they were matched in their determination to conquer the prestigious worlds before them.

Ms. Vance, 36, who is only selectively in the spotlight of her husband's campaign, helped shape - and realize - Mr Vance's ambitions, he said. Her husband had an outgoing charm in a room, but she knew from a lifetime of experience how to pull it off.

"Usha was like my spirit guide from Yale “, he writes. in "Hillbilly Elegy" by his wife, who was played by glamorous actress Freida Pinto in the Netflix adaptation of the book. "She instinctively understood questions I didn't even know how to ask and always encouraged me to seek out opportunities I didn't know existed."

Her advice for him, he said, go on. "I'm one of those guys who really benefits from having kind of a powerful female voice on his left shoulder saying, 'Don't do this, do this,'" Mr. Vance told Megyn Kelly in a 2020 interview. on her podcast, "The Megyn Kelly Show." For a long time, the powerful female voice in Mr. Vance's life was his grandmother, whom he called Mamaw and talked about in "Hillbilly Elegy".

"Now," he said on the podcast, "it's Usha."

And yet, in recent years, Mr. Vance, 38, has created a public image that is remarkably at odds with the world in which he and his wife have built their reputation.

Once a Never Trumper who made a name for himself deciphering working-class white resentment of the liberal center, Mr. Vance nailed to the right before and during his Senate campaign. He carved out a place for himself as the leader of a rising wing of highly nationalist Republicans. This group supports strong immigration restrictions and defends the traditional nuclear family. They blame universities and Silicon Valley for the rise of "woke capital," which they define as the tendency of multinational corporations to adopt progressive stances on social issues to distract from practices that harm American workers. /p>

Mr. Vance's recent rhetoric, culminating in Donald Trump's endorsement in April, has pierced the so-called establishment and its values. (Although, of course, there are few more high-profile gigs in American life than being a senator.)

In June, two days after the Supreme Court invalidated Roe v. Wade, Mr. Vance tweeted: "If your worldview tells you that it's bad for women to become mothers, but it's liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a New York Times cubicle or of Goldman Sachs, you have been...