Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance claimed that his past remarks on the country being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies” was merely a “sarcastic comment” in a face-saving interview with journalist and television personality Megyn Kelly that aired Friday.
In a 2021 interview with former Fox News host and current ally Tucker Carlson, Vance said, “We’re effectively run in this country—via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs—by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” Vance then mentions Vice President Kamala Harris by name.
“Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment,” Ohio Senator Vance told Kelly on Friday. “I’ve got nothing against cats, I’ve got nothing against dogs, I’ve got one dog at home, and I love him, Megyn.” “But,” he continued, “people are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said, and the substance of what I said, Megyn, I’m sorry, it’s true. It’s true that we’ve become anti-family. It is true that the left has become anti-child.”
In the week since President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race and subsequently endorse Harris, there’s been a fresh resurgence of backlash for comments Vance made in the past on the political and social value of parents over childless Americans.
The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board slammed Vance’s comments as “the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts” but “doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.”
Vance’s 2021 conversation with Carlson was an attempt to address comments he had made just days earlier during a speech hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a nonprofit that promotes conservative thought on college campuses. In that address, Vance said parents should have more voting power than childless Americans.
“Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children,” Vance said at the time. “When you go to the polls in this country, as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our Democratic Republic, than people who don’t have kids.”
He took aim at Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Harris, claiming that leading Democrats without kids have no “physical commitment to the future of this country.”
Booker and AOC do not currently have children. The month after Vance’s comments, Buttigieg and his husband Chasten adopted newborn twins. And while Vice President Harris does not have biological children, she is the stepmom of two children, Ella and Cole Emhoff, who refer to her as “Momala.” On Thursday, Ella addressed Vance’s comments about her stepmom on Instagram, saying, “How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like Cole and I?”
On Kelly’s show this week, Vance claimed that his remarks about parental voting power was “obviously” a “thought experiment.”
“I don’t know her family situation,” he continued, referring to Harris. “I’ve read in the media that she’s got two stepkids. I wish her stepchildren, and Kamala Harris and her whole family, the very best. The point is not that she’s lesser; the point is that her party has pursued a set of policies that are profoundly anti-child.”
In both past campaign cycles and this one, Harris has been outspoken in her support for implementing policies that benefit parents, such as comprehensive access to child care and paid family leave.