Democratic strategist James Carville suggested that Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) will likely avoid criticism of his remark that “women do not have children” for a long time, as Democrats slam the vice presidential nominee’s views on abortion and reproduction.
“J.D. Vance is supporting something called menstrual surveillance. How much weirder can it be?” Carville said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “The Beat.” “The whole outfit is obsessed and preoccupied with women’s reproductive decisions. It really is. And that’s going to be, like, that cat lady thing. That’s going to haunt him for a long time.”
Vance is under fire from Democrats after he resurfaced in 2021 with comments criticizing childlessness.
In those remarks, Vance told then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the United States was run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are unhappy with their lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country unhappy, too.”
Democrats tried to use the remarks as a pretext to link them to Vance’s stance on abortion and women’s reproductive rights.
The Ohio Republican lawmaker last week defended his “childless cat lady” remarks, calling them “sarcastic” and attacking Democrats as “anti-family.”
Democrats also pointed to comments Vance made in July 2021 in which he suggested that parents should be given “more of a voice” in voting than parents without children.
Cavill joked that Vance could “rank people based on how many kids they have.”
“Yeah, it’s all incredibly weird. This is what the American middle is like,” he added.
Nonetheless, a Democratic strategist suggested Vance’s resurgent comments were “helping” Democrats.
“I don’t think he can get away with helping the Democratic Party, of course,” Carville said. “And the vice president (Harris) — if that’s true, the people she’s considering — they’re all very substantive, accomplished people, and none of them are unusual.”
Harris emerged as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination after President Biden dropped out of the race last week and endorsed her. Harris told reporters Tuesday that she had not yet made a decision on a running mate.
“Trump would be furious. He’s watching this and he’s got this primal survival instinct. Don Jr. and Tucker don’t have the best reputations. There’s condiments flying around Mar-a-Lago. If you look up, you’re going to get hit with a bottle of ketchup,” Cavill later joked, referencing a story in 2020 where an angry Trump threw a plate of food at him, sending ketchup running down the wall.
Trump’s national press secretary, Caroline Leavitt, last week attempted to clarify Vance’s 2021 comments, saying they had been “taken out of context and unfairly attacked.”
In a video of Vance, a senator from Ohio, speaking in 2021, he mentioned the difficulties some people face in having children and said his remarks were not about them.
“There are a lot of people who can’t have children for very complex and important reasons… Of course, there are people who can’t have children for biological reasons, medical reasons. They’re not the ones who are being targeted,” Vance said at the time.
Vance spokeswoman Taylor Van Kirk pushed back against the criticism, saying “the left-wing media has distorted Senator Vance’s words and created a false narrative about his position on this issue.”
“As he clearly stated, he was talking about left-wing politicians who are clearly anti-child and anti-family. The media can obsess over that as much as they want, but he’s not going to back down on protecting parental rights and advocating for policies that encourage people to have more children,” Van Kirk told The Hill on Tuesday.
