The 39-year-old Vance’s tightly cropped bristles—which Trump has complimented, saying he resembles “a young Abraham Lincoln”—may be part of a larger Republican effort to capture the youth vote, say some right-wing observers.
“The Trump campaign saw how narrow their loss was in 2020 and said, ‘Okay, if we can make some small changes in a certain number of demographic groups in the key swing states, we’ll be able to make a difference,” says Steve Hilding, a Las Vegas-based Republican political consultant, who estimates half the millennials in his office have facial hair.
“I think the Republican Party wants to put on a younger look than the traditional nominees of the past, and JD Vance’s beard is emblematic of all that change. Beards are definitely shifting away from the countercultural left and becoming more in style in general, especially among the conservatives.”
Hilding points to Cruz’s transformation during his 2018 U.S. Senate race against Beto O’Rourke—when he ditched his squeaky debate-team captain aura for a beard and a Carthartt jacket—as an example of the attempted Benjamin Button-ing of the right.
Vance could be similarly rebranding himself as an everyman after shooting to fame as the clean-shaven author of bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, who called himself “a Never Trump guy” and worked as a venture capitalist.
“I think it’s a calculated move to make him appear more relatable,” says Cassondra Kurtz, founder of New York barbershop Beyond the Beard, who notes she’s seen more c-suite types coming in for beard trims ever since the pandemic. “A lot of CEOs and CFOs I work with will acknowledge they find once they start growing out their facial hair, people feel more inclined to just chat with them.”
Kurtz says Vance’s full, short beard brings to mind something “cherubic, kind, and likable.” And that approachable, pull-up-a-stool vibe should strike a chord with the MAGA set, embodying rugged individualism and a defiance of the polished, elite image of the know-it-all smarty-pantses who supposedly run Washington.
“If you look at Trump’s rhetoric, it’s all about how terrible the elite is. Drain the swamp. The deep state. Everything is rigged against us ordinary guys and we’ve got to fight the system,” says Oldstone-Moore. That anti-government stance has shades of the hippie movement. “The language they’re using even sounds like what the ’60s guys were saying, even though it’s coming from the opposite side of the political spectrum. And the look goes with it.”
There’s a certain edgelordiness to Vance’s scruff as well. Conservatives have been positioning themselves online as the counterculture for today’s youth for years, and the beard might be an extension of that, says Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a D.C.-based scholar of extremism and radicalization.
“It’s very aligned with what a younger, very right-wing attitude online has tried to do, which is to say, ‘We’re the counterculture against the boring, triggered mainstream that’s so concerned with political correctness.’ The sharing of memes with hateful content, the weaponization of youth culture online—it’s that same kind of attitude,” she says.“The facial hair evokes a bit of that same feeling of snubbing the nose at the mainstream and at respect and norms that the mainstream sets about appropriateness or what we should say or do.”
