JD Vance - Donald Trump's new running mate - is 'hillbilly' who believes 'the Scots-Irish are among most distinctive groups in the USA... I may be white but I am no WASP'

The international spotlight has turned on JD Vance after the 39-year-old Ohio senator was revealed on Monday to be Mr Trump's pick as vice-president, should Mr Trump be elected again on November 5.

And this looks increasingly likely; The Economist magazine has reported this week that, by averaging out all recent opinion polls, some 46% of voters intend to vote for Mr Trump and 43% for Joe Biden (and that this trend is widening).

• ‘ULSTER-SCOT AT HEART’

JD Vance's family background is complicated and troubled.

He wrote a 2016 memoir called Hillbilly Elegy, in which he sets out a family landscape of poverty, alcoholism and drug addiction among relatives from the "rust belt" region of Appalachia – including a heroin-using mother.

Nonetheless, he went on to join the Marines and then to graduate from Yale Law School.

The website Forbears.io states that Northern Ireland is the number one location worldwide for people with the surname 'Vance'.

According to the site, roughly one in every 2,600 people have that surname in the Province.

However, Mr Vance's biological father's surname was Bowman; he adopted Vance because it belonged to his grandparents, who largely raised him.

An online summary of his book reads as follows: "James David (JD) Vance's family is of Scots-Irish descent.

"His people have a long history of enduring poverty and hardship. Since the 18th century in the United States, the Scots-Irish have been plantation workers, sharecroppers, miners, and factory and millworkers.

"Many settled or have roots in Appalachia. Other Americans sometimes consider JD's people 'hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash'."

Mr Vance himself says in the book: “I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the North-east. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree…

"The Scots-Irish are one of the most distinctive subgroups in America.

"As one observer noted: ‘In traveling across America, the Scots-Irish have consistently blown my mind as far and away the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country. Their family structures, religion and politics, and social lives all remain unchanged compared to the wholesale abandonment of tradition that’s occurred nearly everywhere else.’

"This distinctive embrace of cultural tradition comes along with many good traits – an intense sense of loyalty, a fierce dedication to family and country – but also many bad ones.

"We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or, most important, how they talk.

"To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.”

In the Catholic journal The Lamp in 2020, Mr Vance also wrote of his Protestant roots. He said his mother approved of the preacher Billy Graham, and disapproved of “the political drift of modern Protestantism”.

His father belonged to a “large pentecostal congregation”.

Nevertheless, later in life Mr Vance converted to Catholicism.

• PAST STATEMENTS:

Upon the death of the Queen in September 2022, he said: “Just an extraordinary life. I’ll always remember when she had our national anthem played after 9/11, breaking centuries of tradition at a time when we really needed a reminder of who our friends were.

"May God rest her soul.”

Mr Vance's recent "Islamism" swipe at the UK was made at a conference called National Conservatism last week.

He was quoted as saying: "I have to beat up on the UK – just one additional thing. I was talking with a friend recently…

"I was talking about, you know, 'what is the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon?'

"And we were like, 'maybe it’s Iran, you know, maybe Pakistan already kind of counts'.

"And then we sort of finally decided maybe it’s actually the UK, since Labour just took over.”

Despite being Trump's running mate now, in 2016 he had said Trump's policies "range from immoral to absurd", and that for "every complex problem, he promises a simple solution... he never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t".

In a piece written for The Atlantic that year, he said "Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein," adding that "perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of 'Make America Great Again' [MAGA] for real medicine".