During his 2021 Senate campaign in Ohio, J.D. Vance gave an interview to Fox News where he launched harsh attacks against prominent Democratic Party politicians, including the Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris, who is now on track to face Donald Trump in the presidential elections on November 5th.
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Last week Trump chose Vance as his vice presidential candidate and six days later Joe Biden announced that he was dropping out of the reelection campaign, giving his endorsement to Harris.
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What did Vance say against Kamala Harris?
Vance’s interview was with Tucker Carlson, an ultra-right commentator who is now closely associated with Trump’s candidacy. During the interview, the current senator referred to the Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He mentioned that among these people were Kamala Harris; Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“How does it make sense that we have handed over our country to people who really have no direct interest in it?”, Vance wondered.
Harris became the stepmother of two teenagers when she married lawyer Douglas Emhoff in 2014. And Buttigieg announced that he and his husband adopted twins in September 2021, more than a month before Vance made those comments.
The video with Vance's misogynistic comments began to spread on social media, and Hillary Clinton shared it on Tuesday in a post, adding sarcastically, "what a normal and endearing guy, who certainly doesn't hate women having freedoms."
The comment could be a sign of the duo's problems in attracting female voters, and on the issue of reproductive rights.
It also shows some of the fears expressed by strategists that Trump took a political risk by choosing a running mate who has been in Congress for less than two years and practically has no experience on a bigger stage. Trump liked Vance's telegenic personality and said he reminded him of a "young Abraham Lincoln."
In 2021, Vance also stated that "when you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more availability to express your voice in our democratic republic than people who do not have children".
Vance's campaign defends itself
Vance's spokesperson, Taylor Van Kirk, said that Harris' campaign is lying about the senator's views, pointing out that "it is well known that Senator Vance found success in life largely due to the influence of strong female role models like his grandmother."
From Kamala Harris’s campaign, they countered by saying that “J.D. Vance and Donald Trump’s horrible personal attacks coincide with their dangerous agenda of Project 2025 to ban abortion, decimate our democracy, and destroy Social Security,” spokesperson James Singer pointed out, referring to a policy and personal plan developed by a conservative think tank that would seek to “institutionalize Trumpism,” although Trump himself has tried to distance himself from these ideas.