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A lot has changed for Senator JD Vance after he was chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate last week.
Within days, he had his own campaign plane and a Secret Service code name.
The longtime Ohio and Kentucky football fan is now known to the officers protecting him as “Bobcat” after teams of the same name, DailyMail.com can reveal.
Trump’s choice for vice president may have ultimately gone to Ohio State, but Ohio University’s football team is known as the Bobcats.
And his Appalachian family originally hails from Jackson, Kentucky, home of the Breathitt County Bobcats. This was where young James David spent most of his summers and other vacations.
According to a close friend, the code name is a way to connect his two homelands and the major influences in his life.
Code names used to be essential for security. But now that sensitive communications are encrypted, they are used primarily for brevity and clarity.
Candidates can choose from a list. This means that they can choose code names that have personal meaning to them.
Mike Pence, for example, made the most of his Indiana roots and served as vice president for four years.
Vance, 39, who was named Trump’s running mate at last week’s convention, has found similar inspiration.
A lifelong football fan, he writes movingly in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, about the bond he had with his unreliable, drug-addicted mother over players and tactics.
“Mom borrowed books on soccer strategy from the public library, and we built little models of the field using drawing paper and loose change: pennies for defense, nickels and dimes for offense,” he writes.
After serving in the Marines, he went on to study political science and philosophy at Ohio State University.
His reputation as a working-class Buckeye Party member was one of the factors that put him on Trump’s short list for vice president.
Vance is an Ohioan through and through, having attended Ohio State University
Bobcat and Mogul are pictured together during a meet in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday.
The Ohio Bobcats are an NCAA Division 1 football team in the Mid-American Conference
Vance could be the key to winning over so-called blue wall states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, even though his Ohio heritage sometimes leads to good-natured jokes from the Wolverine State.
After all, Michigan is home to Ohio State’s biggest rival: the University of Michigan.
“My name is JD Vance, and I’m from the great state of Ohio,” he announced when he accepted the vice presidential nomination in Milwaukee last week.
His words prompted a huge cheer from the Ohio delegation, which broke into an “OH-IO” chant. Vance joined in before realizing there was an election to be won.
“Guys, we gotta chill with the Ohio love,” he said with a smile. “We gotta win Michigan here too.”
That happened again later in the speech, when he mentioned his time at Ohio State.
The Michigan delegation erupted in its own good-natured “Let’s Go Blue” chants.