It’s been about six weeks since Donald Trump tapped Sen. JD Vance as his new running mate, and the rollout for the Ohio Republican hasn’t exactly been smooth. In fact, there’s quantifiable evidence that much of the public just doesn’t like the young senator — and his standing hasn’t improved since he became a candidate for national office.
There are different explanations for Vance’s unpopularity, but it seems likely that his lengthy record of condemning Americans without children has contributed to his troubles. Unfortunately for the GOP ticket, that record is still growing. NBC News reported:
Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice presidential nominee, attacked teachers who don’t have children in remarks in 2021 that resurfaced Tuesday. In his public comments, he reserved specific criticism for Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers.
“You know, so many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids, trying to brainwash the minds of our children,” Vance said at a forum in October 2021, about a year before he was elected to office for the first time.
He added, in reference to the AFT leader, “If she wants to brainwash and destroy the mind of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”
Such ugly language would be controversial on its own, but it’s made vastly worse by the totality of his record.
As we’ve discussed, during Vance’s first campaign, the then-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 stepchildren, but no biological children of her own — in his societal condemnation.
What’s more, CNN uncovered related comments from November 2020, when Vance said on a podcast that childless Americans, especially those in the country’s “leadership class,” were “more sociopathic” than those with children and made the country “less mentally stable.” The Republican went on to say that in his experience, the “most deranged” and “most psychotic” people he sees on social media were also typically childless.
Alas, we can keep going. Media Matters, for example, uncovered several additional Fox interviews in which Vance lashed out at “childless” Democrats. Media Matters also found a Breitbart news interview in which the Ohioan claimed that the left’s “next generation leaders,” including “the Kamala Harrises, they don’t have kids. And so there’s this weird way where they want to take our kids and brainwash them so that their ideas continue to exist in the next generation.”
There’s also been extensive reporting of late about Vance suggesting that parents should have greater voting rights than Americans without children, and federal tax policies should “punish” those without children for their “bad” choices.
Mother Jones’ David Corn, meanwhile, uncovered a speech in which Vance said he receives unflattering media coverage because he thinks most journalists are “childless adults.” HuffPost added a report of its own, shining a light on comments the Republican senator made in 2021 about the need to “go to war” against the idea that women can decide not to have children, suggesting that someone who focuses on building their career instead of making babies will be “a sad, lonely, pathetic person.”
About a month ago, Trump told Fox News that he’d encourage voters concerned about Vance to “listen to his words.” The trouble, of course, is that whenever people do listen to Vance’s words, his problems get worse.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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