Usha Vance, wife of Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, carries an 800-page copy of The Iliad on the campaign trail because of their son’s interest in Greek mythology.
Usha told NBC News their son Ewan, just 7, is “obsessed” with Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey.
“That’s because our now-7-year-old decided in the spring that he was obsessed with mythology,” she told the outlet after being spotted with the epic. “He picked up a child’s version of The Odyssey and then The Iliad and all these other things and became completely obsessed. So to keep up with him, I decided it was time to pick The Iliad up myself.”
JD has been married to Usha since 2014 and the couple have three children: two-year-old Mirabel, four-year-old Vivek and Ewan.
She has also been spotted reading other novels as she travels the country with her husband on the campaign trail, such as Tana French’s In the Woods and Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, NBC News reports.
Usha has both kept JD company and acted as a sounding board for the many campaign events he appears at. She even helped him prepare for the debate against Kamala Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
"I think it makes him all the more enthusiastic to do it,” Usha, who has an undergraduate degree in history from Yale, told NBC News. “To have company, someone to talk to in between and someone to talk to you about things that are either entirely unrelated to the events or just maybe to get my perception on how a particular rally went or particular set of questions or that sort of thing, but from my perspective as his wife and his best friend, as opposed to the perspective that other people who are on the plane can give.”
His opponent’s wife, Gwen Walz, has also appeared on the campaign trail and notably slammed the Republican ticket for their attacks on abortion and IVF.
“He is the one who took down Roe and unleashed all of this chaos and all of this cruelty,” she said of Donald Trump.
“Who asked him to tell us how to build our families?” she added. “Nobody asked him and nobody’s going to ask him. JD, we’re not asking.”
