What Does JD Stand for in JD Vance's Name?

JD stands for James David. The vice president's full legal name is James David Vance — James is his first name, David is his middle name, and the initials J.D. are simply the short form he has gone by, in one spelling or another, for his entire life.

The reason the question is asked so often is that the obvious guess is wrong. JD does not stand for Juris Doctor, even though Vance holds a law degree from Yale. The record shows he was "J.D." as a small child, decades before law school: he was born James Donald Bowman in Middletown, Ohio, on August 2, 1984, so his initials were J.D. from birth. When his parents divorced and his mother remarried, the boy was adopted by his stepfather, Bob Hamel, and renamed James David Hamel — the surname changed, the middle name changed, but the initials were kept exactly the same, so the name everyone already called him never had to change at all.

Vance tells the story himself in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, where he introduces himself as J.D. Vance, "like jay-dot-dee-dot," short for James David. His mother told him the David came from an uncle. He writes that he never believed that was the real reason: the change was about erasing his father, Donald Bowman, from his name and from their lives — the adoption even erased the name James Donald Bowman from the public record, and the only birth certificate on file at Ohio's vital statistics office reads James David Hamel, the Associated Press reported.

Any old D name would have done, so long as it wasn't Donald. — JD Vance, Hillbilly Elegy

The plain principle in it is one any family that has been through a break-up understands: names are changed to cut ties, but the initials were the one piece of himself the child got to keep unchanged. The consequence is that almost nobody noticed the changes at all — the letters J.D. stayed constant through three legal identities, so the man the country knows arrived with the most stable-looking name in politics and one of the least stable name histories behind it. Which leaves the question his final change answers by itself: when he was free at last to choose any surname he wanted, why was the one he picked not his father's, not his stepfather's, but his grandmother's?

The details complete the timeline. He lived more than twenty years as James David "J.D." Hamel — through Middletown High School, service in Iraq as Marine Corporal James D. Hamel, Ohio State University and Yale Law School. In April 2013, as he was about to graduate from Yale, he changed his surname to Vance, his maternal grandparents' name and the name of the grandmother, Bonnie "Mamaw" Vance, who raised him; his memoir implies the change came on his wedding day in 2014, but his campaign spokesperson Taylor Van Kirk confirmed to the Associated Press that it was April 2013. One last adjustment was only punctuation: he published Hillbilly Elegy as "J.D. Vance," and after entering politics he dropped the periods and became "JD Vance." Through every version of the name, the two letters never moved — because, as he wrote of the middle name his mother chose for him, "Any old D name would have done, so long as it wasn't Donald."