On Monday, the independent journalist Judd Legum published what he called “A comprehensive guide to J.D. Vance’s views on women and children.” The article included Vance’s now viral comments about “childless cat ladies” and other controversial remarks the Ohio senator has made about parents and families, including giving children the right to vote through their parents.
Most of the citations were from 2021.
Vance, the running mate of former President Donald Trump, is not the only candidate to face backlash for controversial statements made years earlier — a sort of delayed-onset cancel culture. On Monday, The New York Times published a story with the headline “Why the Kamala Harris of four years ago could haunt her in 2024.” Political reporter Reid J. Epstein wrote that “video clips of her old statements and interviews are being weaponized as Republicans aim to define her as a left-wing radical who is out of step with swing voters.”
It seems that lawfare has given way to X-fare. And both political parties and their supporters are hard at work examining everything ever said and recorded.
In previous generations, unearthed videos and statements might have been part of a dossier of “opposition research” done by a campaign or political party. Today, anyone can publish potentially damaging lists if they have time for what former opposition researcher Alan Huffman called “manic Googling,” as well as knowledge of how to use X’s “advanced search” function.
Old social media posts can be mined for not only troublesome statements, but also run-of-the mill missteps, awkwardness and contradictions that get more incendiary with each outraged like or share. Moreover, there’s no slack given when the posts are old. In fact, the older the post, the more triumphant the “get” — as if some long-buried sin has been excavated in the ruins of Pompeii.
The most recent exchange of volleys began when a video clip of Vance’s appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” began to circulate on X. In the clip, Vance said the country is 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.”
The remark made news at the time, and did so again when it circulated after Vance was introduced as Trump’s running mate at the GOP convention. Hillary Clinton, actress Jennifer Aniston and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg were among those who denounced the comment, and Vance went on The Megyn Kelly Show, where he explained, “Obviously it was a sarcastic comment.”
He has since posted on his X account Harris’s 2019 tweet calling Jussie Smollette’s staged attack “an attempted modern day lynching” and a video clip from last year in which Harris said “climate anxiety” is driving young people to question whether they should have children.
While Vance, the father of three, has tried to steer the public conversation to the deeper issues behind his comment — the importance of family, how having children changes people and their priorities, and the need for policymakers to create and support child-friendly policies — the “childless cat lady” phrase seems destined to stick around.
Many women on X, including the English author Jane Fallon, have changed their bios to say “childless cat lady,” turning the phrase into a rallying cry, like Elizabeth Warren did with “Nevertheless she persisted” in 2017 after she was rebuked by Mitch McConnell for giving a lengthy speech.
Even The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board took Vance to task, writing, “The comment is the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts. But it doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.” It was Vance’s “basket of deplorables” moment, The Wall Street Journal said, likening the remark to Hillary Clinton’s disdainful assessment of some Trump voters.
Democrats may have seized on the statement as they did Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” remark in 2012, but they shouldn’t expect it to be Vance’s downfall, said Evan Nierman, founder and CEO of the public relations firm Red Banyan and the author of “The Cancel Culture Curse” and “Crisis Averted,” among other books.
Nierman noted that Vance’s running mate has said even more provocative things with little effect on his popularity. “You have to consider the Republican ticket as a whole. And the fact that he’s got the most bombastic, controversial human in the world at the top of the ticket, that benefits him.” In fact, Nierman said he finds it much more “interesting and amazing” that Vance appears to be surviving negative things he’s said about Donald Trump in the past.
But Nierman noted that anyone with an online presence is at risk of coming under fire for things they have said in the past, even if the comments weren’t overtly provocative like Vance’s statements were. Just taking a position on anything related to religion or politics, for example, can set you up for trouble later, Nierman said.
“You can have the most reserved approach, and be very disciplined and careful about what you do on social media, and people who are ideologically opposed to you will find a reason to take offense and to critique you and make it an issue, no matter what.” That’s why he advises his clients to “stay away from politics, religion and other hot-button cultural issues, to focus on their areas of expertise.”
Huffman, a journalist and author who has also worked as an opposition researcher, said in an email that “mining a candidate’s past statements and tweets is a natural outgrowth of the conventional opposition research approach, which is to research a candidate’s background for telling details that will resonate with voters and, ideally, illustrate their fitness to serve.”
But the enormity of the digital record means that things come to the fore that might not have in the past. Also, there is “the inherent danger of social media to distort things, to promote undocumented claims, and to create an ecosystem that’s more reliant on entertaining quick takes than on thoughtful consideration.”
He added that the hope of opposition researchers “is that you’ll discover something undeniably true that voters will recognize, and that it will go viral. ‘Childless cat ladies’ is a good example. It’s a catchy quick take, but it also tells us something about the candidate’s character. Even if the discourse is fractured, there’s still a chance of finding something buried that will inform a more meaningful and compelling narrative,” Huffman said.
Of course, Vance is trying to drive his own more compelling narrative, too, and he is doubling down on his message that Democrats are the “anti-family” and “anti-child” party. The “cat lady” comment, made to Carlson on Fox News, may have been ill-phrased for a national audience during a presidential campaign three years later, but its context is worth remembering: The appearance came after a speech Vance made to a conservative organization in which he talked about declining birth rates and urged Republicans to lean into being the “pro-family party.”
In that speech, Vance said that he wasn’t criticizing people who weren’t able to have children for any number of reasons, but making the point that having children gives parents a tangible stake, “a physical commitment to the future of this country.” He told Kelly, “Being a parent changes your perspective on the world.”
Meanwhile, while Vance is expounding on his previous stance, the Harris campaign is having to explain how her position has changed on issues like fracking in the past few years. Trump said at his rally in Minnesota on Saturday, “She wants no fracking. She’s on tape. The beautiful thing about modern technology is when you say something, you’re (in trouble) if it’s bad.”
