Jul.31

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

...But J.D. Vance's Past Keeps Catching up with Him...

A couple of weeks ago, it was an endless parade of bad news for the Democrats. Now, the pendulum has shifted. Didn't Newton have some sort of law about this?

With J.D. Vance anointed as Donald Trump's running mate, the media is going through his past interviews and speeches with a fine-toothed comb. And they are striking oil everywhere. Much attention has been paid to his 2021 comments during a Tucker Carlson interview, in which he smeared childless women in general (and Kamala Harris in particular) as "childless cat ladies," and suggested that childless people are less worthy of citizenship than people with kids. As it turns out—surprise, surprise!—that was not just a one-off. CNN and Media Matters have already found a bunch of others:

• Vance once sent a fundraising e-mail railing against "radical childless leaders in this country."
  
  
• On a podcast, he described childless people as "more sociopathic" and "less mentally stable."
  
  
• He tweeted that: "Our country's low birth rates have made many elites sociopaths."
  
  
• Immediately after the Carlson appearance, he sent an e-mail to supporters that said: "Did you see me on FOX Primetime recently? I needed to speak DIRECTLY to patriots like you about the serious issue of radical childless leaders in this country."
  
  
• Not long thereafter, he sent another e-mail that said: "Our country is basically run by childless Democrats who are miserable in their own lives and want to make the rest of the country miserable too... What I want to know is: why have we turned our country over to people who don't have a direct stake in it?"
  
  
• During an interview with Sebastian Gorka, he described Kamala Harris as part of a "childless cabal of people who don't really care about the future."
  
  
• In a speech, Vance described childless Americans as "evil" and declared: "It's not good. It's not healthy. You see the obsessive, weird, almost humiliating aggressive posture of our media and you wonder how could these people possibly seem to be so miserable and unhappy? Well, the answer is because they don't have any kids. Kids are the ultimate way that we find self-meaning in life, whether your own children, your grandchildren, your nieces and nephews."

In short, the sentiments expressed on the Carlson show reflect a worldview that Vance really ascribes to, and that he has reiterated, over and over again, across many different media.

Needless to say, his positions worked OK for an election in red Ohio (although even then, he underwhelmed). But these positions are losers in a national election. And we're not sure there's a solution for Vance here. There's just too much footage and audio of him saying this wild (and weird) stuff. And he doesn't actually want to back off of his position, anyhow, because the base eats it up. The only way this doesn't hurt the Vance-Trump ticket is if Vance's wacky ideas on childless people become old news, and are forgotten by voters. With less than 100 days to go, and given how insulting and judgmental his views are, we doubt that will happen. (Z)