A Gentle Reminder That Cat Ladies and the Childless Vote, Too

All my right-wing heroes are childless 😮

Several general election seasons ago, I started BRIGHT as a daily email to communicate to the Julias — the fictional yet very real women Democrats talked to in their “Life of Julia” ad in 2012. “Julia” was a single woman, perhaps a cat lady, and the Democrats appealed to her as a real person with real struggles. From Head Start to the retirement home, it was a government-funded cradle to grave story. Jill Lepore of The New Yorker described it, saying, “[T]he Obama campaign's Web site launched a slide show called ‘The Life of Julia.’ It tells the story of an imaginary woman's life from childhood to old age and is meant to illustrate ‘how President Obama's policies help one woman over her lifetime—and how Mitt Romney would change her story.”

Republicans pounced (as we like to do!) on Julia’s life choices and rightly criticized the Democrats’ taxpayer-funded programs for her. But Republicans didn’t offer an alternative for Julia, only questioned how she got in this situation of government reliance without a family. Today many on the Right doing it again. Why is she still single? Why didn’t she have children earlier? Why does she treat her cats like her children? How can she be a political leader when she has no stake in the future?

In 2013, Ben Domenech wrote on Real Clear Politics:

In impact, compassionate conservatism thus amounts to little more than a bidding war over who can run the life of Julia more efficiently and inexpensively – a busybody politics, as Thomas Sowell describes it, of soft technocracy. “Whether in housing, education or innumerable other aspects of life, the key to busybody politics, and its endlessly imposed “solutions,” is that third parties pay no price for being wrong. This not only presents opportunities for the busybodies to engage in moral preening, but also to flatter themselves that they know better what is good for other people than these other people know for themselves.”

The busybodies on the Right on the importance of having children to prolong the species often sound like the busybodies on the Left on the importance of not having children to fight climate change.

Now, old interviews with Senator J.D. Vance are making the rounds thanks to a coordinated effort that even includes a “Friend” chiming in to her 40 million Instagram followers. Mediaite calls the moment “viral” as if it’s organic and not a coordinated media plan.

In 2021, Senator Vance said, “We’re 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. And 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.”

Senator Vance is not alone. There are dozens of men and women I admire and follow on social media with the same talking points about cat ladies and the childless. There is no shortage of white papers and policy articles written by people smarter than me on the societal ramifications of toxic dating culture, putting off marriage, causes of infertility, and prevalence of childless world leaders.

Many of my heroes fall into the childless category — Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Greg Gutfeld, and Scott Adams. Other notables include C.S. Lewis and George Washington, only to name a few. Many of those making sweeping pronouncements on social media about the childless have the same heroes and wouldn’t dare make these points to our heroes’ faces.

Credit: Rush Limbaugh via Facebook

More than ever, American voters are listening and learning where they stand with Republicans.

As I know from my own experience and friends who have echoed similar feelings, talking negatively about someone being single or a couple being childless is often salting the wounds of a painful reality filled with heartbreak. Maybe it was their own choices that led them there. Maybe they didn’t read your white paper before biology took over. But so what? Disparaging their lives rather than having an alternative message of hope is not a winning strategy.

Emily Jashinsky also makes a good point, saying, “The right should appeal to the victims of the culture it seeks to repair, not denigrate them when our entire argument is that these women were set up for failure by others.”

This isn’t advice to appeal to those hell-bent on misinterpreting everything a Republican says. It’s to remind Republicans that because this is such a consequential election, our words and tone may be considered by many new voters for the first time ever.

Will disparaging the childless and cat ladies make me not vote for Trump and Vance? Not a chance. I don’t even like cats. But I don’t speak for every single or childless person. In this election, Republicans have a real message of hope and opportunity for everyone. Let’s not leave them out of the conversation.

To garner every vote, Republicans should talk to voters about the struggles we share. For example, single women or men in a one-income household can be hit hardest by a bad economy or unsafe city. Likewise, a childless couple may have been waiting for financial stability that never came.

Republicans can lead with a message of hope for cat ladies, childless couples, and all Americans. They must set aside the white paper talking points and speak with optimism rather scold people for decisions that can’t be undone. Insults about cat ladies, fat ladies, and incels don’t win votes. It alienates potential converts and signals that they’re not wanted. I don’t want to leave any votes on the table. It’s time to stop talking like an edgelord and win the general election.

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