What the press does not understand is Vance’s remark was not a mistke. 100% of childless cat ladies were not voting for Trump/Vance and were probably turning out at 100%, so you had nothing to lose by ridiculing them, and probabably a lot to gain as you activated voters who did not like hardcore feminists/lesbians/single-childless-women-nuts-about-cats. Politics is about contrasts and separation. Not about “can’t we all get along?”. Akin to the statistical process of discrimination you are seeking to balance within-group-differences and between-group-differences. “Childless cat ladies” is not a group you want within the target group of voters you are seeking to assemble. Pissing them off is not a bug, it’s a feature.
Vance’s “childless cat ladies” remark was directed at the Democrat leaders in office. And when asked about the comment recently, Vance says the same thing - thank God - and doesn’t hem and haw about it. (He always answers their questions directly, with conviction and facts and logic).
From the Guardian:
Speaking in 2021, a year shy of election to the US Senate in Ohio and when best known as the author of the bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, Vance told the then Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the US was 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 [vice-president] Kamala Harris, [US transportation secretary] Pete Buttigieg, AOC [congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] – the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. 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?”