Milwaukee — California delegates and officials at the Republican National Convention in Wisconsin cheered the news that Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance is former President Donald Trump’s pick for vice president.

Trump announced the news on his social media site Truth Social Monday afternoon, saying Vance is the “best suited” for the job and praising Vance’s biography as a Marine Corps veteran, Yale Law School graduate and bestselling author of the 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. That book was based on his upbringing in rural Ohio and the struggles of his white working-class family.

California delegate Amanda Morales, the 23-year-old executive director of the San Bernardino Republican Party, praised Vance’s youth — at 39, he could become one of the youngest vice presidents in history. She and others spoke to KQED on the floor of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee as Trump was formally nominated for president Monday.

“He’s a fighter, and I think that’s what the American people need,” Morales said of Vance. “It’s nice to get younger people getting involved in politics and I’m super excited.”

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California Assemblymember Bill Essayli (R-Riverside), one of the Legislature’s most outspoken conservative voices, said Vance will be a “loyal” vice president to Trump. Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence, has been largely shunned in the Republican party since refusing on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump’s calls to overturn the 2020 election results. Vance has indicated he would have acted differently than Pence on Jan. 6, telling ABC News earlier this year that there should have been “multiple slates of electors” from some of the closest states.

Essayli didn’t mention Pence but said Vance had demonstrated his devotion to the former president and praised his “well-rounded” background in business and public service.

“He’s been very loyal to the president. I think it is very important, considering everything the president’s going to be under again. I mean, they tried to impeach him twice, charged him with cases. So you need someone who’s going to be extremely loyal to the president. I think JD is the man for that job,” Essayli said.

Attendees hold signs in support of former President Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 15, 2024. (Scott Shafer/KQED)

Vance has become synonymous with the MAGA movement in recent years. But before he entered politics, he lived in San Francisco for several years and worked as a corporate lawyer at Mithril Capital Management in the Presidio, a venture capital firm headed by Peter Thiel. Thiel was one of the first big Silicon Valley investors to back Trump in 2016 though he’s soured on the former president since.

Vance went in the opposite direction.

After criticizing Trump in 2016 as “unfit for our nation’s highest office,” he became a staunch supporter of the former president and one of his closest Senate allies after winning an Ohio seat in 2021.

Vance’s Silicon Valley background and political turnaround, from Trump critic to MAGA champion, doesn’t seem to bother Trump supporters. Delegate Keith Koo, of Fremont, said Vance both understands the tech community and middle America. And Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a GOP delegate and outspoken conservative, called Vance “an American hero.”

“He absolutely loves his country. He’s doing what he’s doing for this country, not for himself,” Bianco said, adding that his background in tech will “serve him well.”

Republican Lanhee Chen, who ran for state controller in California in 2022 and is a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institute at Stanford, said Vance is a smart choice for Trump, citing both his youth and his populist philosophy.

“I think it’s a pick that makes a lot of sense from the perspective of generational change, which is one of the things that President Trump’s talked about,” he said. “But I also think if you look at it from a sort of policy point of view, you have someone who has at least recently been very steeped in the populist side of the Republican Party. His pick sort of emphasizes the degree to which that is going to be an important element of the policy agendas in the party going forward.”

The pick — of someone as bombastic and pugilistic as Trump — marks yet another shift in the fast-moving presidential campaign, which has been rocked in recent weeks by first Biden’s poor debate performance and then the assassination attempt on Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday.

Even as Trump and other Republicans called for calm and unity in recent days, Vance took to X to blame Biden and Democrats.

“Today is not just some isolated incident,” Vance wrote. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

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