Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, speaks at a campaign rally at Middletown High School, Monday, July 22, 2024, in Middletown, Ohio. (AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson)
Vance wants to give parents more votes than people without children and has been hostile to those without kids as part of his worldview that involves using the power of the government to promote higher birth rates.
J.D. Vance could soon be a heartbeat away from the presidency as 78-year-old Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, which means he’s getting a lot more scrutiny over his views, policy ideas, and past speeches and statements.
One of the most controversial of those statements is Vance’s repudiation of one of the very principles of American democracy: one person, one vote. Put simply, this is the idea of equal representation — that any one person’s voting power should be the same as any other person’s.
Vance, however, believes that people with children should have significantly greater power when they go to the ballot box. During a 2021 speech at an event hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a group that promotes conservative thought on college campuses, Vance proposed giving children the ability to vote, but only if their parents controlled those votes.
“Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children,” Vance said. “When you go to the polls in this country, as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids.”
“Let’s face the consequences and the reality. If you don’t have as much as an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice,” he continued.
@couriernewsroom JD Vance says if you don’t have kids, your vote shouldn’t count as much.
In response to reporting on Vance’s statement and footage of his speech going viral this week, Trump 2024 National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed Vance’s words “are being taken out of context” and that he was being “unfairly attacked.”
She pointed to a part of Vance’s speech where he discussed how he wasn’t focusing on people who were “unable to have kids for very complicated and important reasons” or those who can’t have children for biological or medical reasons.
“The target of these remarks is not them,” Vance said.
What went unchallenged by the Trump campaign is that Vance believes some people’s votes should count more than others.
J.D. Vance is obsessed with fertility and birthrates
While Vance’s idea would almost certainly be impossible to implement and of questionable legality, it fits in with his worldview of wanting to use the power of the US government to promote higher birth rates — so much so that he can’t help but be hostile to people who decide not to have kids.
In his speech, Vance argued that conservatives had lost power over the nation’s cultural institutions and needed to encourage families to have more kids to avert a “civilizational crisis.”
He also attacked Vice President Kamala Harris for being childless, even though she has two step-children—suggesting he doesn’t believe step-children count as children. During his 2021 speech, Vance criticized Harris and three fellow Democrats — Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — for not having kids, and suggested it should disqualify them from being elected leaders.
“What is the one thing that unites every single one of them?” Vance said. “Not a single one of them has any children. Now why is that? Why have we let the Democrat Party become controlled by people who don’t have any children?”
Vance has repeated that attack line in other interviews and speeches in recent years.
“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 told Fox News during his campaign for US Senate in Ohio.
“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?” Vance said.
Buttigieg, notably, has since adopted fraternal twins with his husband. But these “cat ladies,” Vance has said, have no “direct stake” in America’s future and “hate normal Americans for choosing family over these ridiculous D.C. and New York status games.”
Vance’s obsession with people having children and boosting birthrates branches out in strange directions, too. In 2020, he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that “daylight savings time reduces fertility by at least 10 percent.”
J.D. Vance’s views on divorce and child care
As part of his effort to encourage more families to have kids, Vance has also implied that it should be harder to get divorced. While speaking at Pacifica Christian High School in California in 2021, Vance spoke of his grandparents who raised him, applauding the fact that they never separated, even though they had an “incredibly chaotic marriage.” He even suggested that people in “violent” marriages should try to work things out.
At multiple forums in 2021, Vance also touted a program in Hungary that awards loans to couples who get married before the bride’s 41st birthday—with a third of the loans becoming forgivable if the couple goes on to have two children, and the whole debt wiped out if they have three. Vance has said that the US should consider implementing a similar program, and has endorsed modest plans to support married families who have children and stay-at-home parents.
Notably, however, he opposes efforts to pass a national childcare program to help address the nation’s long-simmering childcare crisis—a reason why some Americans forego children.
“‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people,” Vance wrote on X in 2021, arguing that it was a “massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class.”
Vance, however, may be projecting his own views onto those voters. Polls have consistently shown that an overwhelming majority of Americans want the government and candidates for elected office to do more to help them afford childcare and expand access to childcare.
Voters also appear to loathe Vance’s remarks about “childless cat ladies” making the rest of the country miserable. A recent Data for Progress poll found that 56% of Americans disagree with Vance’s statement, while only 30% agree.
It’s unclear, however, where voters stand on giving people with kids more votes or whether daylight savings time reduces fertility — the ideas are so outlandish they’ve never been polled, as far as we can tell.
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