The GOP had already mostly lost unmarried women — then came J.D. Vance

A Republican Party that has for decades alienated single women seems to have found its champion in JD Vance. A potentially bigger problem? Donald Trump’s pick of Vance as his running mate could cement the chasm between the GOP and unmarried women while also driving away married women, and even some married men, who lean Republican.

Since Trump put the Ohio senator on his presidential ticket, Vance’s past statements about “childless cat ladies” who are “miserable,” his opposition to no-fault divorce, his hostility to reproductive rights and his agreement with the belief that the “whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” is to raise their grandchildren are getting renewed attention.

Vance’s resurfaced comments draw on long-standing tropes about unmarried women and women without children. They have sparked mockery, but also ire. Experts say Vance’s rhetoric and policy proposals could exacerbate a gender gap that started to develop between the two major parties in the 1980s. And it’s a gap that already had the potential to become a gulf in the first White House contest after the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

“The reason Vance is turning out to be a disaster is all of his statements about cat ladies, that people who have children should have more votes than people who don’t have children … you’ve got the makings of a real, you know, revolt among women,” said Elaine Kamarck, a scholar with the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution.

“The gender gap has persisted but Dobbs, I think, is going to just drive a truck through it — the Dobbs decision is obviously bigger than anything we’ve ever seen,” she added.

Since rising to the top of the Democratic ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris has doubled down on running to restore reproductive rights and personal freedoms — and the message resonates with the never-married women who make up a key part of the Democratic base. It’s been reinforced by her pick of running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who has used his post as the state’s top executive to protect abortion access.

Trump, meanwhile, has taken credit for ending federal abortion rights with his Supreme Court nominations and has already alienated women by objectifying and insulting them based on their gender, along with being credibly accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women. His selection of Vance appears to be amplifying that alienation; Vance’s derisive comments about women have negatively defined how many voters viewed him as a VP pick out of the gate.

“JD Vance’s views on women and positions on the issues that affect women…the most acutely are off-putting to the entire electorate because they’re just not reflective of broadly held values,” Evan Roth Smith, lead pollster for the Democratic survey research initiative Blueprint, said on a Thursday call with reporters. “They’re reflective of an ideology that is incompatible with the electorate.”

Pew Research Center data from 2023 shows that women who have never been married identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party by a margin of 48 points — 72 to 24 percent. Meanwhile, married women identify or lean Republican by a margin of five points, or 50 to 45 percent.

Never-married women are 11 points more likely than never-married men to identify or lean Democratic.

Never-married voters of both genders turn out at lower rates than their married or divorced counterparts, a trend likely also associated with the never-married voting bloc skewing young. However, inflammatory statements such as those made by Vance and GOP policies that could curtail widely popular reproductive health care such as IVF could prompt them to vote, experts said.

Mallory Newall with the IPSOS polling firm said that the marriage gap is not a new phenomenon, but what “is happening is that there’s more of a spotlight being shown on this gap that does exist.” Part of the reason, she said, is the Dobbs decision and also “a vice presidential nominee using rhetoric to disparage single women.”

“Can this burgeoning enthusiasm among Democrats pull some unmarried women off the bench and up to the polls in November, whether that’s in response to Vance’s rhetoric, or whether that’s in response to actual policy change?” Newall asked.

The Harris-Walz campaign has had to do little to draw connections between Vance’s sentiments and the policies he has advocated for, which would disproportionately impact women. Vance has made clear on his own that he believes a person’s value to society — particularly when they are a woman — is linked to marriage and childrearing.

During his 2022 Senate campaign, Vance asserted that the Democratic Party was led by too many politicians who did not have biological children and because of that, had no stake in the future of the country. He repeatedly called them “childless cat ladies” — a term he has applied to men, women and sometimes also to people in parenting and other caregiving roles. Those on the receiving end of his criticism included Harris, who has two stepchildren.

In a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson, then of Fox News, Vance said: “We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, 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.”

Vance stood by the comments once Trump put him on the Republican ticket, saying he was being “sarcastic.” Then, he made an effort at clarifying his words — “I have nothing against cats,” he said. He criticized Democrats as “anti-family,” telling Megyn Kelly on her Sirius radio show, “Look, people are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said …And the substance of what I actually said is true.”

The National Women’s Law Center Action Fund, which advocates for family and caregiving policies, recently conducted a poll with Morning Consult that broke out women who do not have children but who have cats or dogs as subgroups.

The poll, which surveyed 1,766 registered voters from August 1-2, found that women without children as a group and the smaller subset of women without children who had cats were equally or more likely than parents to support policies including comprehensive investments in education, guaranteeing access to child care, expanding the child tax credit and passing paid medical and family leave.

“As a childless cat lady myself, I’m not surprised by these results, which directly refute JD Vance’s insulting claim that women without children don’t have a stake in the success of our nation’s children and families,” said Sandra Markowitz, the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund’s director of research.

The share of 40-year-olds who have never been married shot up from just 6 percent in 1990 to 25 percent as of 2021, according to the Pew Research Center. And the gap in marriage rates between Democrats and Republicans “cracked open in the 1980s and has widened in the past quarter century,” according to the leading research firm Gallup.

Gallup attributes the trend not primarily to economic or demographic differences, but to cultural ones regarding the value of marriage. Between 1988 and 2012, the share of adults under 50 who said they believed married people are generally happier fell by 33 percentage points among Democrats, but just 13 points among Republicans.

Gaps in voting behavior between divorced men and women are also widening. Data from the Survey Center on American Life at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) showed 56 percent of divorced men support Trump, but just 42 percent of divorced women do.

“More than any time in the recent past, American politics is pushing men and women apart rather than bringing them together,” wrote Daniel Cox, the center’s director and a senior fellow at AEI who has written extensively on the marriage gap.

The trend has not gone unnoticed by Republican commentators. Fox News personality Jesse Watters was quick to place Republican losses in the 2022 midterm elections at the feet of single women, saying, “We need these ladies to get married. It’s time to fall in love and just settle down. Guys, go out and put a ring on it.”

Some research indicates that Vance’s views, in particular, may also be unappealing to men.

Blueprint, a center-left polling initiative backed by Democratic mega-donor Reid Hoffman, conducted surveys on Vance’s favorability and testing messages against him in July, when he became Trump’s running mate, and again in August.

Their research found that as more voters became aware of Vance and his stances, his favorability ratings fell from -7 in the July survey to -11 in August. The survey also asked voters if they had heard of 11 of Vance’s past statements. The highest share of voters — 50 percent — had heard of the “childless cat ladies” comment. Of those, 56 percent said it bothered them, including 45 percent who said it bothered them a lot. Over 60 percent of respondents also said they were bothered by Vance’s past stances defending a lack of exceptions in abortion bans; he has since expressed support for exceptions.

Smith said that Vance received meager support from women to begin with, and men contributed much of the drop in his favorability between the two surveys.

“There are those erosions beyond just the people and the women who would be affected by his policies,” he said. “A lot of men don’t like hearing how he talks about women.”

The most effective messages opposing Vance tested in the August poll were rooted in Vance’s past comments about women and his anti-abortion stances.

“Republicans had already priced in the impact of their reproductive policies when it comes to single women of childbearing age and younger women,” he added. “But they had not priced in the thinking that voters outside of that group could be turned off by how the Republican Party nominee vice president would talk about women … that they would suffer electoral losses outside of that cohort.”