Donald Trump picks Ohio senator JD Vance as 2024 running mate

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Donald Trump has picked Senator JD Vance as his running mate, elevating a former US marine who grew up poor in a move that could help the former president win votes across the crucial swing states of the US’s industrial Midwest.

Trump announced Vance, the junior US senator from Ohio, as his vice-presidential pick on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, and just two days after a gunman tried to assassinate the former president.

Vance, who once described Trump as an “idiot” and said he was a “never Trump guy”, has been among his most ardent supporters in recent years and one of his most fluent surrogates on the campaign trail.

The announcement ended months of speculation and completed the Republican party’s 2024 ticket with less than four months to go until November’s election. Trump leads his Democratic rival, President Joe Biden, in most national and swing state polls.

Trump’s decision marks a meteoric rise for Vance, who was elected to the Senate for the first time just two years ago. If Trump, 78, wins another term, Vance, 39, will be just a heartbeat away from the presidency. The vice-president is the first person in the presidential succession.

Vance first came to national prominence in 2016 with the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir about growing up in white, working-class America surrounded by substance abuse. The US Marine Corps veteran and Yale Law School graduate worked in venture capital before turning to politics.

Trump had delayed making an announcement until the last possible minute, in a drawn-out process that he likened to a “highly sophisticated version of The Apprentice”, his one-time reality TV franchise. As recently as last week, Trump had said he was still weighing “four or five” possible running mates.

Trump famously fell out with his former vice-president, Mike Pence, after the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol, when a mob of the then- president’s supporters threatened Pence for his decision to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, confirming Biden’s victory.

Pence has not endorsed Trump’s latest bid for the White House, but at the weekend said he was praying for his former boss’s “full recovery” after the shooting at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.