In 2013, two students at Yale Law School decided to organize a discussion group on the subject of “social decline in white America.”

One of them was J.D. Vance, currently the Republican candidate in Ohio for a U.S. Senate seat.

For him, the subject matter was intensely personal: He had grown up in an economically depressed area of Ohio, and was raised in large part by his grandparents as his mother struggled with addiction.

He had lived the material.

The other student behind the project was Usha Chilukuri, the child of Indian immigrants, from an ethnically diverse San Diego suburb. For her, white social decline may have been an intellectual interest — but it was one with special significance. She was then Mr. Vance’s girlfriend, now his wife, known as Usha Vance.

The reading list for the group, according to emails reviewed by The New York Times, included scholarly papers like “Urban Appalachian Children: An ‘Invisible’ Minority in City Schools.” The syllabus would become something like the theoretical spine for Mr. Vance’s hit 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” which is set against the social ills of the white working class in the postindustrial Midwest.

On paper, the gregarious Mr. Vance and the reserved Ms. Chilukuri may not have looked like a fit. But, according to contemporaries at Yale Law School, they were matched in their determination to conquer the prestigious worlds before them.

Ms. Vance, 36, who only selectively comes into the spotlight on her husband’s campaign, helped shape — and actualize — Mr. Vance’s ambitions, he has said. Her husband had outgoing charm in a room, but she knew, from a lifetime of experience, how to succeed.

“Usha was like my Yale spirit guide,” he wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy” of his wife, who was played by the glamorous actress Freida Pinto in the Netflix adaptation of the book. “She instinctively understood the questions I didn’t even know to ask and she always encouraged me to seek opportunities that I didn’t know existed.”

Her counsel to him, he has said, continues. “I’m one of those guys who really benefits from having sort of a powerful female voice over his left shoulder saying, “Don’t do that, do that,” Mr. Vance told Megyn Kelly in a 2020 interview on her podcast, “The Megyn Kelly Show.” For a long time, the powerful female voice in Mr. Vance’s life was his grandmother, whom he called Mamaw and wrote about in “Hillbilly Elegy.”

“Now,” he said on the podcast, “it’s Usha.”

And yet, in recent years, Mr. Vance, 38, has created a public image that is remarkably at odds with the world in which he and his wife built their reputations.

Once a Never Trumper who made his name deciphering working-class white resentment for the liberal center, Mr. Vance has tacked to the right leading up to and during his Senate campaign. He has staked out a place as a leader of an ascendant wing of highly nationalistic Republicans. This group supports significant restrictions on immigration and champions the traditional nuclear family. They blame universities and Silicon Valley for the rise of “woke capital,” which they define as the trend of multinational corporations taking progressive stances on social issues to distract from practices that hurt American workers.

Mr. Vance’s recent rhetoric, which resulted in a Donald Trump endorsement in April, has been piercing of the so-called establishment and its values. (Though, of course, there are few gigs more prestigious in American life than senator.)

In June, two days after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, Mr. Vance tweeted, “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”

Ms. Vance was, according to an online database that includes voter registration records, a registered Democrat until at least 2014. She has clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and works at Munger, Tolles & Olson, a California law firm whose website describes its corporate culture as “radically progressive.”

In other words, though Ms. Vance has supported Mr. Vance’s rightward turn, she remains ensconced in the milieu that Mr. Vance, in his current campaign persona, rails against.

Through a spokeswoman, Ms. and Mr. Vance declined to be interviewed for this article.

From Yale to Newsmax

Press attention in Ohio to Ms. Vance has been scant, but sometimes racially insensitive. An Oct. 10 editorial cartoon in The Plain Dealer, a Cleveland newspaper, attempted to satirize Mr. Vance’s criticism of the decision by Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team last year to change its name from the Indians to the Guardians. The cartoon showed Mr. Vance dressed in a San Francisco Giants uniform and speaking into a microphone. The caption read: “Only Indians name change I support is my wife’s to ‘Senator J.D. Vance’s spouse.’”

At a campaign stop in Middletown, Ohio, Mr. Vance addressed the cartoon and his criticism of the media. “You’re making a racist joke about my wife, and no one is calling them out for it,” he said. “It’s disgusting and despicable, and it’s why nobody trusts the media.” A spokeswoman for The Plain Dealer declined to comment.

In August, the Vances appeared together on Newsmax, the cable channel to the right of Fox News, which refused to call the 2020 presidential race for Joe Biden for more than a month after the election. Ms. Vance sat to her husband’s left, her hand on his arm. They were in front of a bookshelf that included book club favorites like “The Growing Season” by Sarah Frey and “Crying in H Mart,” the 2021 memoir by the Japanese Breakfast musician Michelle Zauner, alongside the libertarian classic “The Road to Serfdom.”

“The J.D. that I met back when we were in law school is the J.D. that I’m sitting next to right now,” Ms. Vance told the anchor, a sound bite that seemed designed to meet the criticism that her husband was a Johnny-come-lately to the populist wing of the Republican Party.

(The couple’s top-drawer education may not be a positive thing to highlight for some of the channel’s viewers; Newsmax earlier this year published a piece with the headline “Whatever They’re Teaching at Yale Law School, It’s Frightening.”)

The Newsmax appearance wasn’t the only indication that Ms. Vance was supportive of her husband’s political metamorphosis. In December 2021, Federal Election Commission records show, she gave money to Blake Masters, an Arizona Senate candidate, a fellow national conservative who, like Mr. Vance, has received millions in donations from the tech billionaire Peter Thiel. (Both Mr. Vance and Mr. Masters have worked for Mr. Thiel.) It is the only political contribution the F.E.C. has on record for her.

‘She Was the Boss’

Ms. Vance has been preparing to succeed her whole life. She was raised in Rancho Peñasquitos, an upwardly mobile suburb of San Diego, by a mechanical engineer and a biologist. The family was part of a small, close-knit community of Indian American academics and professionals, and their children.

“By age 5 or 6, she had assumed a leadership role,” said Vikram Rao, a close family friend of Ms. Vance’s who works in Silicon Valley. “She decided which board games we were going to play and what the rules were going to be. She was never mean or unkind, but she was the boss.”

Ms. Vance was “a bookworm” in high school, according to Lizzie Le, a classmate who is a real estate agent in Rancho Peñasquitos. Ms. Vance played the flute in the school marching band. She was competitive. When The San Diego Union-Tribune interviewed high school students taking part in a trivia competition, Usha, 17 at the time, told the newspaper, “It’s not enough to know the answers, you have to do it fast.”

At Yale, her résumé continued to be well rounded. She majored in history, volunteered to help the homeless, tutored public school students and edited a public school advocacy magazine called Our Education. She learned cultural dances associated with ballet folklorico.

After Yale, she studied at the University of Cambridge on a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, to research the origins of copyright law.

According to Gabriel Winant, a friend of Ms. Vance’s at Cambridge who is now a historian at the University of Chicago, their broader friend group was left of center, with Marxists well represented. Mr. Winant described Ms. Vance as smart, reserved and occasionally acerbic.

“She could notice something funny or hypocritical or ironic in what others were saying or doing,” he said.

Ms. Vance was keenly aware of the importance of brand-name credentials, Mr. Winant said. When he was deciding where to go to graduate school, “I remember her saying Yale is the best place,” Mr. Winant said. “It will turn your career into what you want it to be.”

At Yale Law School, she and Mr. Vance were in the same first year “small group” of about 15 students who take all their classes together. Mr. Vance was instantly smitten.

“She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful,” he wrote in his memoir. “I joked with a buddy that if she had possessed a terrible personality, she would have made an excellent heroine in an Ayn Rand novel, but she had a great sense of humor and an extraordinarily direct way of speaking.”

Both Mr. and Ms. Vance took contract law from Amy Chua, the popular but divisive professor, who became a mentor to each. Ms. Chua encouraged Mr. Vance to write “Hillbilly Elegy,” and to focus on his relationship with Ms. Vance, according to a 2017 interview with The Atlantic.

They married in Kentucky in 2014, with wooden benches for guests set outside in the grass. In a separate ceremony, they were blessed by a Hindu pundit.

A Political Cipher

As Mr. Vance worked on “Hillbilly Elegy,” his wife pursued federal clerkships, first in the Eastern District of Kentucky, and then in the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where she clerked for Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh. In Washington, Mr. Vance practiced law at Sidley Austin.

“Usha definitely brings me back to earth,” Mr. Vance told Ms. Kelly in 2020 on her podcast. “If I get a little too cocky or a little too proud, I just remind myself that she’s way more accomplished than I.”

In 2015, the Vances moved to San Francisco, where Ms. Vance started as an associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson, and Mr. Vance went to work at Mithril Capital, an investment firm co-founded by Peter Thiel.

A 2019 American Lawyer article about Munger, Tolles & Olson’s diverse hiring practices put it in the “cool, woke category.” Though she had clerked for conservative judges, Ms. Vance was perceived by her colleagues as a liberal or a moderate, according to two people who worked with her at the firm, and asked for anonymity because they did not want to face professional consequences for discussing a colleague.

In 2017, Ms. Vance clerked for Chief Justice Roberts on the Supreme Court. Her colleagues were as impressed by her intelligence — she had “intimidating smarts,” as Nick Harper, a fellow Supreme Court clerk, said — as they were by her dedication to caring for her and Mr. Vance’s newborn first child alongside the demanding job. (The Vances now have three children under the age of 6.)

“It was clear that her family was immensely important to her,” said Sean Mirski, another clerk at the time. Mr. Vance, riding high on the success of “Hillbilly Elegy,” was a frequent guest at clerk happy hours. Neither Mr. Harper nor Mr. Mirski recalled Ms. Vance ever discussing politics.

Indeed, Ms. Vance is something of a political enigma even to people who know her extremely well.

“Political football has never been a central part of her identity,” said Mr. Rao, who, before the pandemic, had been a guest at the Vance home in Cincinnati. “This is not someone who wakes up every day and thinks, ‘Did my team win or lose?’”

But Mr. Vance plays the game. As he has chased far-right voters, he has castigated the world his wife comes from, the one that shaped him as a young adult.

In November 2021, Mr. Vance gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference entitled “The Universities are the Enemy.”

“We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country,” said Mr. Vance, whose mother-in-law is a college provost at the University of California San Diego. “The universities do not pursue knowledge and truth,” he added. “They pursue deceit and lies.”

That world has, in turn, started to reject Mr. Vance. Ahead of the September 2021 wedding of Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld — a daughter of Ms. Chua — multiple guests requested not to be seated next to the Vances, according to two people who attended the wedding. (The couple did not attend, in the end, because their children had the flu and Ms. Vance was soon to deliver their third child, according to two people close to the Vance family.)

Ms. Vance returned to Munger, Tolles & Olson in 2019. Her work has included helping to defend the University of California against claims that it violated Title IX, and the Walt Disney Company, against claims of copyright infringement.

According to one former and one current lawyer at the firm, some employees at Munger, Tolles & Olson are confused and disappointed by Ms. Vance’s support of her husband’s Trumpian turn, and his rhetoric on gender and immigration.

A New Life in Ohio

In 2018 the couple bought a 5,000 square-foot Victorian Gothic house on several acres in an upscale, liberal-leaning neighborhood on the east side of Cincinnati. The house, which cost $1.4 million, dates back to 1858 and is considered an important home by local historians. It has a sweeping staircase, verdant grounds for their dogs, Pippin and Casper, and separate structures including a two-story building by a swimming pool.

Ms. Vance — who works remotely for her firm’s San Francisco and D.C. offices — is not widely known among the city’s establishment, though in 2020 she joined the board of directors of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. (Dianne Rosenberg, the board chair and a civic leader and patron of the arts in Cincinnati, declined to comment about Ms. Vance joining the board.)

Mr. Vance’s first ad to air on television after he won the Republican primary last spring featured Ms. Vance, sitting at a table in a blue dress with polka dots, making her husband’s pitch. “​​Our family’s story is an Ohio story,” she said.

After that, Ms. Vance faded back into the background of the campaign’s narrative for months.

“She has not been appearing alongside J.D. the way Fran DeWine appears alongside Mike DeWine,” said Mark R. Weaver, a veteran Republican strategist in Ohio, referring to the state’s governor and his wife. “That is the ultimate 100 percent deployment of a political spouse. It’s just very difficult to deploy your wife in your campaign aggressively when you have three young children and she has a platinum level legal career.”

Mr. Weaver noted that Ms. Vance’s coastal credentials may have been more of an issue for Republican primary voters last spring than they are in the general contest this fall.

And as the race has moved into its final stages, Ms. Vance has become more publicly involved. On Oct. 20, she joined Ms. DeWine, at an event in support of an agricultural interest group called “Our Ohio,” held at Phillips Tube Group, a woman-led steel tube manufacturer. (Mr. DeWine is running for re-election, and, like Mr. Vance, he has been endorsed by Mr. Trump.)

Once the campaign is behind them, perhaps Ms. Vance will have more time for one of her passions — reading. Between 2007 and 2010, Ms. Vance posted 65 “read” books to her Goodreads account, including novels by Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as nonfiction by Nina Burleigh and Nicholas Kristof. Then her account went dormant for six years.

In 2016, Ms. Vance briefly returned to Goodreads to share her enthusiasm for a new book: “Hillbilly Elegy.” She gave it a 5-star rating.