A popular recent short video shows that Trump supporters are now talking about possibility and hope. Vance didn’t move left to accommodate Trump, Trump has moved rightward, to the politics of aspiration. That is a shift of substance by Trump.

Trump was, of course, on a path to victory before bringing on Vance. Yet Vance could broaden the Republican ticket’s appeal with this shift. Thanks to his wife Usha, born to academics who migrated to the US from India (her father lectures in aerospace engineering and her mother is a marine molecular biologist and chemist), he is well-placed to make a measured case for considered immigration.

His obvious love and respect for his wife and her family will make it harder for Democrats to claim that he is racist for opposing the effectively open southern border over which Biden has presided. While Vance grew up in poverty and dysfunction he studied law at Yale, meaning he doesn’t just talk about the importance of aspiration but has demonstrated that it can be successful.

He can communicate on an intellectual level to those turned off by Trump’s anti-intellectualism while remaining a man of the people. In his RNC speech he spoke of the abstract “idea of America” – a society governed, he said, by the rule of law and religious liberty – but emphasised that America is much more than an idea. It is, he declared, “a group of people with a shared history and a common future … in short, a nation”.

This echoes the great epiphany of the right following Brexit and Trump’s success in 2016: that highly educated and mobile global citizens had been careless of less privileged people’s lives when they traded national pride and solidarity, something of little value to them, for global business opportunities.

Vance also brings something less tangible that would serve a Trump presidency: an understanding of ambiguity. In perhaps one of the most overlooked passages of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance describes the contradictions of good policy that smash ideological purity. He describes his grandmother “Mamaw” as “a radical conservative or a European-style social Democrat”, depending on her mood.

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“Yet I realised that in Mamaw’s contradictions lay great wisdom,” he writes. “I’d curse our government for not helping enough, and then I’d wonder if, in its attempts to help, it actually made the problem worse.” There’s a conservative humility in that statement that is a much-needed balance against Trumpian bombast.

With Vance there is hope that the American conservative movement could rebuild, providing an important counterweight to evangelical revolutionaries. Trump was born to wealth yet has a knack for connecting with those left behind. Vance grew up as one of them and has since transcended his disadvantage in a demonstration of what the idea of America is meant to be. That makes him an important symbol of what the future can hold. With Vance as Trump’s vice presidential candidate, the medium is the message.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.

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