TIf you’re going to shoot a cat, you better not miss. It all started with a comment made by J.D. Vance in 2021, long before he was the Republican vice presidential nominee. To be fair, Vance lives in a world of few repercussions, where he can hate Trump one minute and love him the next without any discrediting. So when he was asked about this historic comment in July, he must have been stunned.
“This is just a basic fact,” he told Tucker Carlson in 2021. “You only need to look at Kamala Harris,[Transportation Secretary]Pete Buttigieg, AOC[Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]to see that the entire future of the Democratic Party is hinged on people who don’t have children. And what does it mean that we’ve just handed the country over to people who don’t actually have a direct stake in it?” Omitting parenthood and long-termism is an acceptable facet of the childfree taboo in politics. You can call it stupid, but you can’t call it misogynistic because it has nothing to do with gender.
But then he ruined the quiet part by saying it out loud, which is a new Republican strategy if you replace “quiet” with “crazy as hell”: They’re “a bunch of childless catty-cat women who are miserable about their lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
When the comments resurfaced this summer, Harris’ campaign said Vance was “not pro-family, but anti-woman.” One of the most sincere comments came from Jennifer Aniston, who has well-known about her struggles with infertility, who wrote on Instagram, “I pray for your daughter, Vance, that she is lucky enough to have children of her own one day.” At the same time, he also managed to offend all stepparents (Kamala has no children, except for two stepchildren with Doug Emhoff), all gay parents, and all adoptive parents (Buttigieg has two adopted children with his husband, Chasten).
But never mind the kids. Can someone please think about the cats? Taylor Swift is just the most famous member of a large constituency that is not only unashamedly child-free, but proud of its felines. On Tuesday, she ended her endorsement of Harris with the words “child-free cat woman,” to which Elon Musk responded with a creepy, “Okay, Taylor… you win… I’ll give you kids and protect your cat with my life.”
Will this hurt Republicans in the election, and if so, where? First of all, forget about dogs because they’re “purple.” Dog owners are Democrats and Republicans alike. If Vance was trying to speak to his imaginary base, the line “we dog people despise the lame cat owners” wouldn’t work. Democrats are slightly more likely to own cats (40%) than Republicans (35%), but there are still a significant number of Republicans who could be alienated if they love their pets more than politics. When it comes to feline affection, the numbers are very close: 31.8% of cat-owning Democrats and 33.3% of cat-owning Republicans say cats are the most important member of their family, which leads me to infer that Whiskers is definitely more important than the president.
It’s hard to say which states are the battleground states, but it’s easy to say which are the states with the most cat owners: Vermont, Maine, West Virginia, Indiana, New Hampshire, Iowa, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, and Wisconsin. According to the New York Times, only Wisconsin is a battleground state, but if you use Nate Silver’s methodology (which I don’t want to use because he predicts a landslide victory for Trump in the electoral votes), New Hampshire is also on the list. If you imagine that people who own cats and even have children will support Kamala, that’s a no-brainer, at least for the Democrats.
Watching this week’s Trump-Harris debate, you could almost imagine his claim about Springfield, Ohio, being a last-ditch attempt to reorient his campaign as a friend of cats. The odd thing about Trump is that you can’t imagine him being friendly with any animal, not even an iguana. A cat would be too aloof and challenge his narcissism. A dog would overwhelm him with affection, but deep down he knows he’s done nothing to deserve it. And the dog itself would be confused because his commands don’t make sense.
In any case, back in Springfield, according to Trump, immigrants from Haiti “eat dogs, and the people who come in eat cats.” “They eat the pets of the people who live there.” The direct roots of this false rumor lie in a video in which a Springfield resident claims that recent immigrants are eating ducks in a pond, a pre-existing right-wing trope. It was repurposed to refer to domestic dogs, making it sound even more fanciful, but it soon spawned a plethora of AI-generated images of Trump as Francis of Assisi protecting dogs and cats, and a bold billboard campaign by the Arizona Republican Party to “Eat Less Kittens and Vote Republican!” Will this win back the cat vote? I say. Not in a million years.