A lot changed for Sen. J.D. Vance after being selected last week as Donald Trump‘s running mate.
Within days he had his own campaign plane and a Secret Service codename.
The longtime Ohio and Kentucky football fan is now known to the agents protecting him as ‘Bobcat,’ after teams of the same name, DailyMail.com can reveal.
Trump’s V.P. pick may have eventually gone to Ohio State, but Ohio University’s football team is known as the Bobcats.
And his Appalachian family is originally from Jackson, Kentucky, home of the Breathitt County Bobcats. This was where the young James David spent most of his summers and other vacations.
The codename is a way of straddling his two homes and the big influences of his life, according to a longtime friend.
Once upon a time, the codenames were essential to security. But with sensitive communications now encrypted, they are used now largely for brevity and clarity.
Candidates get to pick from a list, which means they can choose codenames that mean something personal to them.
Mike Pence, for example, made the most of his Indiana roots and was ‘Hoosier’ for his four years as vice president.
Vance, 39, installed as Trump’s running mate at the party convention last week, has taken similar inspiration.
He is a lifelong football fan and writes movingly in his memoir ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ about bonding with his unreliable, addict mother over players and tactics.
‘Mom checked out books on football strategy from the public library, and we built little models of the field with construction paper and loose change—pennies for the defense, nickels and dimes for the offense,’ he writes.
After serving in the Marines, he enrolled at Ohio State University to study political science and philosophy.
His blue-collar Buckeye credentials are one of the factors that propelled him on to Trump’s V.P. shortlist.
Vance is Ohio through and through, and attended Ohio State University
Bobcat and Mogul pictured together at a rally 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 states in the so-called blue wall, such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, even if his Ohio roots do sometimes trigger good-natured banter from the Wolverine state.
Michigan is after all home to Ohio State’s biggest rivals in the form of the University of Michigan.
‘My name is J.D. Vance, from the great state of Ohio,’ he announced as he accepted the V.P. nomination in Milwaukee last week.
His words fueled huge cheers from the Ohio delegation, who struck up an ‘O-H-IO’ chant. Vance joined in before realizing there was an election to win.
‘You guys, we’ve got to chill with the Ohio love,’ he said with a smile. ‘We’ve got to win Michigan too here.’
It happened again later in the speech when he brought up his time at Ohio State.
The Michigan delegation erupted in its own good-natured ‘Let’s Go Blue’ chants.
