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Vance proved to be a big risk for Thiel, but one that paid off. Even with Thiel’s financial backing and a Tucker Carlson endorsement, Vance’s campaign was stuck in second gear as recently as early April. But his polling numbers quickly spiked after he received a coveted Trump endorsement a little less than three weeks ago. Donald Trump Jr. also joined Vance on the campaign trail. In the end, Vance became the outsider candidate; Josh Mandel, Vance’s biggest rival, won the support of senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee—and the backing of the traditional conservative group Club for Growth. Vance’s ability to eke out a win shows not only the power Trump’s endorsement still has in the party, but also the rise of this new post-Trump ideology that Vance and his backers appear to be building.
On his face, Vance may sound like a strange beneficiary of support from a Trump-loving magnate like Thiel. Vance, a Yale graduate who grew up in the Rust Belt, became a darling of liberal commentators in the early years of Trump’s presidency, thanks to his best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which sought to understand the ideology of Trump supporters. (As my colleague Eric Lutz reported, Vance once labeled himself a “Never Trump guy” and worried the former president could be “America’s Hitler.”) But Vance and Thiel have history; Vance worked for Thiel’s venture capital firm, and more recently the tech billionaire backed Vance’s venture capital firm in 2020. And in Vance’s Thiel-fueled rebrand as a Trump-loving right-winger, he has thrown away his cosmopolitan credentials in favor of a beard, red meat politics, and endorsements from representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz.
