The Kamala Harris campaign recently circulated an old clip of J. D. Vance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show in which Vance discusses a speech he gave on family policy and the American Dream. In the 30-second Fox clip, Vance suggested that progressivism is a selfish ideology that forsakes posterity for the whims of those living in the present. He observed that some of its most prominent proponents tend to be childless.
“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,” he said. “It’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC. The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does that make any sense, when we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
This hit a nerve with many women, especially online. TikTok ran wild with satirical videos of young women dancing with their felines over a voiceover of Vance.
Understandably, some women found Vance’s view tone-deaf, given its omission of the issue of infertility. Among all women, 13.4 percent ages 15–49 and 15.4 percent ages 25–49 had impaired fecundity in 2015–2019, according to the CDC. Actress Jennifer Aniston, who struggled to get pregnant throughout her 30s and 40s, tweeted Wednesday, referring to Vance’s daughter, “I pray your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”
Today on the Megyn Kelly Show, Vance addressed the backlash to his comments and clarified that he was speaking to men, too, and advocating family-building generally. He also clarified his thoughts on women for whom childbearing is not an option:
“It’s not a criticism of people who don’t have children,” he said. “I explicitly said in my remarks, despite the fact that the media has lied about this, that this is not about criticizing people who for various reasons didn’t have kids, this is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child.”
I won’t dispute that Vance’s remarks were poorly phrased and politically unhelpful, given that suburban women have been the key to recent Democratic victories and that Republicans have been hoping to close that gap. But they raise deeper questions about why women have moved left in the first place and why they continue to stay there.
Since 1996, female voters have preferred the Democratic candidate in the presidential election. It is poorly understood why conservatism consistently fails to attract the fairer sex. The knee-jerk guess is that women are spooked by Republicans’ caustic messaging and aesthetics, including rhetoric that reduces women to an unsolvable problem. But stodgy, tone-deaf marketing is probably not the only explanation.
From a young age, the American female is inundated with entertainment and education of a progressive bent. If she asks Google a question about puberty, Planned Parenthood appears high up in the search results as an authority to consult. She spends all her schooling years absorbing leftist indoctrination from the K–12 system and academia. If she didn’t grow up in a very conservative-grounded household, her content-consumption habits will inevitably follow pop culture. And pop culture is degenerate.
A Spotify chart of the top ten podcasts in America recently shared on Twitter showed a juxtaposition in the style of podcasts hosted by men versus those helmed by women. Female-centric podcasts that win out right now include the historically sexually explicit Call Her Daddy. Male-centric podcasts that reign supreme include The Tucker Carlson Show and The Joe Rogan Experience. While this ranking doesn’t reveal the exact gender breakdown of listeners to the shows, it suggests that men and women have different appetites in what content they seek.
Some have speculated online that the Red Pill manosphere, with infamous personalities such as Andrew Tate, have repelled women from the Right. Tate’s content preys on the minds of young men who are disaffected because of dating circumstances. He encourages them to acquire wealth (including through his own get-rich-quick schemes), fancy toys, and physical prowess to attract women. Tate also tells men to demand submission, and a high tolerance for infidelity, from those same women. But that movement emerged only a couple years ago.
While marriage and family formation might help anchor and insulate women from progressivism — 24 percent of unmarried women lean Republican compared with 50 percent of married women who lean Republican, according to an April Pew Research study — many women report a lack of eligible suitors. Fifty-six percent of women say it’s hard to find someone who meets their expectations, and 65 percent of women say it’s hard to find someone looking for the same type of relationship as they are, according to a 2020 Pew Research study. Women are also more likely to say they have had some particularly negative experiences in the dating realm.
Vance’s ill-put complaint underscored a real demographic trend in politics, one Republicans should work to understand and counter. This isn’t the way to do it, though. GOP politicians hoping to court women shouldn’t start by knocking them when they’re down.