You better not miss if you’re aiming at a cat. It all started in 2021, with a comment by JD Vance, long before he became the Republican vice presidential nominee alongside Donald Trump. To be fair to the guy, Vance lives in a world of limited consequences, where you can hate Trump one minute and love him the next, and your credibility won’t suffer. So he must have been shocked in July when he was called out for that comment. It went down in history.
“It’s a fundamental fact,” he told Tucker Carlson in 2021: “You look at Kamala Harris, you look at Pete Buttigieg [el secretario de Transporte]to the AOC [la congresista Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]: and you see that the future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. “What sense does it make to entrust our country to people who actually have no vested interest in them?
This vision of parenthood and the long term may be an acceptable facet of the taboo of childlessness in politics: it can be called stupid, but it cannot be called misogynistic, since it has no gender.
But then he ruined it all by saying out loud the calm part, which, if we replaced “calm” with “completely crazy,” would describe the Republicans’ new playbook. And he said, “This is a bunch of women with cats and no kids who are unhappy with their own lives and the decisions they’ve made, and that’s why they want the rest of the country to feel unhappy, too.”
When those comments resurfaced this summer, Harris’ campaign said Vance was “not pro-family, but anti-women.” One of the most heartfelt interventions came from Jennifer Aniston, who has struggled with infertility, saying on Instagram, “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter will be blessed with children of her own one day.” At the same time, he had managed to offend every father-in-law out there. [Kamala Harris por sí misma no tiene hijos, si no se cuentan sus dos hijastros con Doug Emhoff]to all homosexual parents and to all adoptive parents [Buttigieg ha adoptado dos hijos con su marido, Chasten]” .
But forget the kids: Is anyone thinking about cats? Taylor Swift is just the most prominent member of a large group of people who are not only unashamed of not having children, but are also proud of their cats. She signed her endorsement of Harris’ presidential bid on Tuesday with the signature of a “childless cat lady,” to which Elon Musk responded in… You win… I will give you a son and take care of your cats with my life.
Will this erode Republican electoral power, and if so, where? First, forget about dogs, since they are “purple”: Dog owners are equally likely to be Democrats and Republicans. And if Vance were trying to appeal to an imaginary base—“We dogs despise sterile cat keepers”—it wouldn’t work.
Democrats are slightly more likely to own a cat (40%) than Republicans (35%), but that’s still a significant number of Republican voters who, if they love their pets more than their politics, might be disappointed. The numbers are very even in terms of cat devotion: 31.8% of Democrats and 33.3% of Republicans who own a cat said it was the most important member of their family, from which I decided to infer that Whiskers is significantly more important than the president.
Determining swing states is a dark art, but it’s easy to tell which states have the most cat owners: Vermont, Maine, West Virginia, Indiana, New Hampshire, Iowa, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, and Wisconsin.
According to the New York Times, only one of them is a swing state (Wisconsin), but using Nate Silver’s method (which I prefer not to use, because it predicts a Trump landslide in electoral votes), New Hampshire is also in the race. If you consider that everyone who owns a cat, even those who also have children, is leaning toward Kamala Harris, that would mean at least some revenue for the Democrats.
Watching Trump’s debate with Harris on Tuesday, it’s almost plausible that his claims about Springfield, Ohio, are a last-minute attempt to reorient his pro-cat campaign. Trump’s uniqueness is that you can’t imagine him communing with any animal, not even an iguana. A cat would be too distant and challenge his narcissism; a dog would baffle him with affection—which deep down he knows he’s done nothing to deserve—and he himself would be baffled, because his commands would make no sense.
But anyway, back to Springfield, where migrants from Haiti are “eating the dogs, the people who have arrived, they are eating the cats,” according to Trump: “They are eating the pets of the people who live there.”
This false rumor has its closest roots in a video in which a Springfield resident claims that new immigrants were eating ducks from a pond, but it’s a recurring theme on the right. Repurposed for pets, it seems even more fanciful, but it immediately triggered a slew of AI-generated images featuring Trump as a Francis of Assisi figure protecting cats and dogs, as well as a bold ad campaign from the Arizona Republican Party that read, “Eat fewer kittens, vote Republican!” Can this win back the cat vote? Not in a million years, I’d say.
