JD Vance says people took his childless cat lady comment ‘the wrong way’

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Republican vice presidential contender JD Vance was back in the hot seat Sunday over comments he made while running for the US Senate in 2021 about Americans — particularly women — without children.

The Ohio senator spoke to NBC’s Kristen Welker just a few days after his running mate spoke to her colleagues at the network during a trip to the southern border. In his interview, he was asked once again whether he “regrets” making a dig at “childless cat ladies” — something he said he did not regret doing. Instead, he said he regretted that Democrats were supposedly “lying” about the context of his remarks.

He also fired back at the idea that some women voters may take his words as a “gut punch” and would wonder if he’d really represent both men and women.

“Look, I regret certainly that a lot of people took it the wrong way, and I certainly regret that the DNC and Kamala Harris lied about it,” Vance said.

When Welker pressed him again, he answered: “I have a lot of regrets, Kristen, but making a joke three years ago is not at the top ten of the list.”

Welker’s line of questioning did not get into the meat of Vance’s comments at all; namely, the assertion that a woman’s role in society is primarily as a childbearer. Vance made several comments to this regard, both in a speech to a conservative group in 2021 as well as during an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News around the same time.

There was also the undertones of the “childless cat lady” comment itself: the dual assertion that Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg do not have children (both do, through “nontraditional” means), and that those Americans who do not have children “don’t really have a direct stake in” the country’s future, per Vance’s words.

Those twin arguments would not be out of place in a right-wing Christian nationalist radio broadcast but put Vance on the extreme fringe of the American contemporary political spectrum. They’ve been seized by Democrats in recent weeks as Harris’s party pummels their opponents as out of touch extremists with “weird” views about women.

Vance has sought to walk back his remarks on multiple occasions, with Sunday being his latest attempt — he referred to them as “sarcastic” remarks to Welker. But Buttigieg in particular has gone for the jugular, accusing Vance of not recognizing adoptees, step-parents and a whole range of other family structures which do not cleanly fit the nuclear model.

In the same interview with Welker on Sunday, Vance took another step in that effort and pledged that a second Trump administration would not allow a national abortion ban to be instituted.

The Republican vice presidential contender has seen his favorable ratings plummet amid the barrage and the Trump campaign as a whole has largely lost its momentum in the race since his nomination and the announcement which quickly followed: Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race. The former president now trails Harris, his new opponent, in an average of national polling while swing states appear to largely be trending in the vice president’s favor.

This weekend, the Harris campaign also announced that it had pulled in more that $80m in donations during the four-day Democraic National Convention last week, bringing their one-month fundraising total starting from the launch of her campaign past the $500m mark.