Vance: ‘Childless cat ladies’ remark ‘one of the dumbest things I ever said’

Vice President Vance said he regrets a previous comment he made about members of the Democratic Party being “childless cat ladies,” saying that it was “one of the dumbest things” he ever said.

During the 2024 presidential race, Vance faced heat for comments he made in 2021 when he was running for an Ohio Senate seat. The vice president told political commentator and then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson the U.S. was 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.”

“It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance said, referring to a common nickname for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

In a passage of his upcoming book, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” reported Monday by NBC News, Vance wrote, “one of the dumbest things I ever said came when I argued that ‘childless cat ladies’ across the Democrat Party were running our country into the ground.”

“The comment caused two firestorms: the first when I made it, the second years later during a political campaign,” he adds. “It was a boneheaded comment, intentionally (and successfully) provocative rather than illuminating.”

Vance’s resurfaced 2021 comment resulted in widespread backlash from Democrats in 2024, with pop star Taylor Swift even signing off on an endorsement for then-Vice President Kamala Harris as a “Childless Cat Lady” in September of that year.

The vice president’s book is set to come out Tuesday, according to a March press release that describes it as “an intimate account of why he strayed from the Christianity of his youth and what led him back to faith.”

Vance: ‘Childless cat ladies’ remark ‘one of the dumbest things I ever said’

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