Kamala Harris is wise to target JD "Cat Lady" Vance — the GOP's "incel platform" repels voters

For his political opponents, Donald Trump offers a target-rich environment: his criminality, his bigotry, his "bleach those lungs"-levels of ignorance, and, of course, his overall weirdness. At first blush, his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, seems less vulnerable. Vance can speak in complete sentences without rambling about sharks or electrocution. Unlike his boss, Vance is fully literate and capable of writing grammatical sentences without random capitalizations. Vance has not been convicted of any crimes, and he even looks relatively normal, especially compared to the makeup-caked Republican candidate with an elaborate combover. If one accused Vance of smelling like body odor mixed with ketchup, most people would not believe it. 

And yet, the fledgling presidential campaign of Vice President Harris is lampooning Vance nearly as often as they're going after Trump, and in the same terms: Vance is "weird." In particular, the Harris campaign has thoroughly lambasted Vance for his love of the tedious misogynist trope of the "cat lady." Vance has repeatedly insulted women who have not given birth by saying they're "miserable" and attacking cats, which are popular pets with people of all genders and parental statuses. He's defended these comments by claiming "the left" is "anti-child" and "anti-family," even though all evidence shows that children are happier when they're born to parents who want them. He even tried to joke that he's "got nothing against cats," which the Harris campaign correctly pointed out means that he is still standing by his denigration of people who have no biological children. 

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

In addition to the willfully childless, Vance attacked stepparents like Harris and adoptive parents like Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg in his list of "miserable cat ladies." This is a fixation of his, as evidenced by a 2020 clip that was unearthed Tuesday, in which he said "people who don’t have kids at home" — which describes most people under 25 and over 55 — as "more sociopathic." 

Putting Vance on the defense over this is smart for many reasons, including the fact that childless people, stepparents, and adoptive parents have a right to vote, whether Vance likes it or not. It also fits with the "freedom" and "not going back" messages of the Harris campaign by underscoring why Trump and Vance oppose reproductive rights. But it's also helpful because it reminds voters that Trump has a long history of appealing to a deeply unpopular constituency: gross men. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted on Twitter, "It’s an incel platform, dude. It’s SUPER weird."

Vance, 39, married a decade ago and isn't an incel, which is internet slang for a subclass of misogynists who identify as "involuntarily celibate." But his odd "cat lady" rhetoric ties him to a larger far-right fringe defined by their regressive and downright strange attitudes about women, dating, and family life. Incels are one piece of it, but there are also groups like the Proud Boys, "men's rights activists," and "tradcaths," who claim to be reviving "traditional" Catholicism. What binds these groups together is faith in an imaginary past where both men and women happily and unquestioningly submit to repressed sexuality and rigid gender roles.

This is undoubtedly a fantasy version of history and Vance's adherence to it confirms the Democratic charge that MAGA is "weird." It's not just that most modern Americans don't have a "Leave It To Beaver" lifestyle. Most Americans understand that "Leave It To Beaver" was a silly TV show, not reality. Most Americans understand that innovations like no-fault divorce, which Vance has denounced, acceptance of premarital sex, and LGBTQ rights were responses to pre-existing needs of real human beings, and that whatever social upheavals they may have caused were minor compared to the drastic reduction of human suffering. 

One doesn't need to be deeply immersed in the MAGA subcultures of "tradcaths" or "incels" to grasp who Vance is speaking to in these clips: Men who, because of their own personal or romantic failures, have been radicalized towards an ideology so far to the right that it's fascistic. Over the years, Trump has relied heavily on this community of under-sexed nerds, angry divorced men, and dudes with an array of hang-ups to fuel what is now nine full years of presidential campaigning. Trump's close ally Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., even said as much recently, telling Newsmax that the GOP can afford to lose female voters because they're picking up new male voters with this politics of resentment. By picking Vance, who speaks fluent Internet Weirdo, Trump appeared to be shoring up his pitch to this base of aggrieved men.

Trump's own sexual promiscuity and frequent divorces can sometimes lull voters into complacency, as they tell themselves that he can't really support all the radical anti-sex and anti-woman policies he's embraced. But he personally chose Vance, making it that much harder to run away from the entirely correct charge that Trump has aligned himself with people who have extreme, authoritarian dreams of controlling the sex lives of Americans down to the minute details. For instance, the group behind Project 2025, which is set up to be the agenda of a Trump White House, proudly tweeted about their goals of "ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills." Trump has many close allies that use the term "recreational sex" to slander the private lives of nearly all Americans, straight and queer, married or not. 

As Melissa Ryan wrote at Ctrl Alt Right Delete, Vance is deeply entrenched in a "neoreactionary" movement that "calls for the fall of democracies and a return to monarchy and aristocracy." Vance was propped up financially and politically by tech investor Peter Thiel, who has questioned whether women should have the right to vote. Thiel has also backed pseudo-intellectual Curtis Yarvin, who Vance has quoted, and who called slavery a "natural human relationship" akin to "that of patron and client." Vance himself has floated proposals to water down the votes of women and single people by giving "parents" — mostly fathers in practice — an extra vote per child. This odd proposal shares DNA with the Christian fundamentalist notion of "household voting," in which a father does the voting for everyone else in the home. It's another backdoor effort to terminate women's suffrage. 

In the days following Vance being named running mate, a silly meme exploded across the internet, falsely claiming that he had written about having sex with a couch in his book "Hillbilly Elegy." The person who concocted this rumor meant it as a joke and, as far as I can tell, everyone who has repeated it also means it as a joke. Even though no one believes the couch story is literally true, the meme spread like wildfire. As the guy who wrote the joke told Business Insider, he was inspired by filmmaker Werner Herzog's concept of "ecstatic truths," which can both be technically false but "make some essence of the man visible." In this case, the "essence" of Vance is that he's got some weird and inhumane views on human sexuality and gender relations. He was a poor pick as running mate for this reason, and yet Trump's choice was its own "ecstatic truth," revealing how deeply screwed up MAGA is about sex and gender.

Or, as the Harris campaign Twitter account wryly put it, "JD Vance does not couch his hatred for women."