Sen. JD Vance has been a candidate for national office for 11 days now, and during that time, Americans have learned quite a bit about the Ohio Republican. The unaccomplished senator, however, hasn’t made an especially good first impression.
Many officials in his own party believe Donald Trump made the wrong choice when picking a new running mate, and Vance is the first vice presidential hopeful in the modern era to have a negative favorability rating the week after his party’s convention.
But amid the avalanche of information voters have received about the 39-year-old lawmaker, three words have come to define his worldview.
Three years ago, during his first campaign for elected office, the then-Senate candidate appeared on Fox News and diagnosed what he saw as a crisis plaguing the United States. The country, Vance told a national television audience, was being run “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. It’s just a basic fact.”
The future senator specifically included Vice President Kamala Harris — who has step-children, but no biological children of her own — in his societal condemnation.
JD Vance says women who haven’t given birth like Kamala Harris are “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” and have “no direct stake” in America. pic.twitter.com/3DJY3pQTGe
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 22, 2024
He’s quite the charmer.
The ugliness of Vance’s rhetoric — rooted in the idea that those without biological children are somehow lesser, unreliable and undeserving of positions of leadership — has not gone unnoticed. On the contrary, it seems to have spread with extraordinary speed this week, drawing sharp rebukes from those who are generally detached from the political discourse.
The GOP’s vice presidential nominee has made plenty of similar comments during his brief tenure in the political arena, but as CNN’s Andy Kaczynski noted this week, the “childless cat ladies” comment was “permeating the culture,” while simultaneously “defining Vance to a lot of people.”








