Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance claimed that his past remarks on the country being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies” was merely a “sarcastic comment” in a face-saving interview with journalist and television personality Megyn Kelly that aired Friday.

In a 2021 interview with former Fox News host and current ally Tucker Carlson, 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.” Vance then mentions Vice President Kamala Harris by name.

“Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment,” Ohio Senator Vance told Kelly on Friday. “I’ve got nothing against cats, I’ve got nothing against dogs, I’ve got one dog at home, and I love him, Megyn.” “But,” he continued, “people are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said, and the substance of what I said, Megyn, I’m sorry, it’s true. It’s true that we’ve become anti-family. It is true that the left has become anti-child.”

In the week since President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race and subsequently endorse Harris, there’s been a fresh resurgence of backlash for comments Vance made in the past on the political and social value of parents over childless Americans.

The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board slammed Vance’s comments as “the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts” but “doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.”

Vance’s 2021 conversation with Carlson was an attempt to address comments he had made just days earlier during a speech hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a nonprofit that promotes conservative thought on college campuses. In that address, Vance said parents should have more voting power than childless Americans.

“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 at the time. “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.”

He took aim at Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Harris, claiming that leading Democrats without kids have no “physical commitment to the future of this country.”

Booker and AOC do not currently have children. The month after Vance’s comments, Buttigieg and his husband Chasten adopted newborn twins. And while Vice President Harris does not have biological children, she is the stepmom of two children, Ella and Cole Emhoff, who refer to her as “Momala.” On Thursday, Ella addressed Vance’s comments about her stepmom on Instagram, saying, “How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like Cole and I?”

On Kelly’s show this week, Vance claimed that his remarks about parental voting power was “obviously” a “thought experiment.”

“I don’t know her family situation,” he continued, referring to Harris. “I’ve read in the media that she’s got two stepkids. I wish her stepchildren, and Kamala Harris and her whole family, the very best. The point is not that she’s lesser; the point is that her party has pursued a set of policies that are profoundly anti-child.”

In both past campaign cycles and this one, Harris has been outspoken in her support for implementing policies that benefit parents, such as comprehensive access to child care and paid family leave.

And in Congress, she’s walked that talk.

As senator from California, in 2019, Harris co-sponsored the “Child Care for Working Families Act,” which, if passed, would have increased federal funding for childcare, with the ultimate goal of providing access to childcare for every kid under 13, more than doubled the number of children who could get childcare assistance, and ensure that families who fall into a certain income bracket would never pay more than 7 percent of their household income on childcare.

“We believe in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty, where every person can buy a home, start a family and build wealth. And where every person has access to paid family leave and affordable child care,” Harris said during a speech to staff on Monday—the day after announcing that she was running for president—at her campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.

According to a 2024 report by Care.com, 60 percent of respondents reported spending 20 percent or more of their household income on childcare.

Melissa Boteach, vice president of child care/early learning and income security at the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund, told The 19th News that Harris’ “lived experience as well as being in conversation with real families across the board for decades of her career,” make her uniquely poised to address voters’ concerns about family-centered policies.

“If you are looking to speak to people where there is a married household, where there is a breadwinner father, homemaker mother and 2.2 children, you’re not going to find a lot of families that fit that description,” Boteach said. “Harris understands that.”

If Vance wins alongside former president Donald Trump in November, he will follow in the footsteps of an administration that consistently sidestepped protections for children.

When Trump took office in 2017, uninsured rates for children were at a record low. During his administration, the number of uninsured children reached 4.4 million. This shift, according to the Center for American Progress, can be attributed to “cuts in outreach and enrollment assistance, efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and anti-immigrant policies that have led to lower enrollment in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.”

The Trump administration also rolled back Obama-era health standards on school lunches, removed the National Center for Environmental Research, an office of the Environmental Protection Agency that provides millions of dollars toward the study of the effects of chemicals on children’s health, and Trump himself signed legislation that dismantled federal privacy rules on the internet which protected kids from invasive advertising.

“I think it’s shameful for the Democrats to hide behind their personal circumstances when they have supported policies that have made it harder on working moms and dads,” Vance said to Kelly, adding, “I’m actually glad the left is attacking me over this, because I think it’s started an important conversation about how our society became so profoundly anti-family.”