JD Vance forgot one thing: Childless cat ladies vote in swing states

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

Republican VP candidate JD Vance might want to stop insulting childless cat ladies.

Pittsburgh – in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania where Trump is losing his lead – ranked as the top city for most single women who own cats, according to an analysis by The Independent.

In a 2021 interview, Vance complained that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies” – including Kamala Harris – “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.”

That quote came back to haunt him after Donald Trump nominated him as his running partner, and the line quickly went viral.

The Independent combed through the data and found Pittsburgh has the most amount of childless cat ladies in the country.

With 67.9 per cent of women being single, 15.1 per cent of residents under age 18, and the 15th highest rate of cat ownership, Pittsburgh may well be the most popular city for Vance’s enemy demographic.

Washington, DC, New York City, Baltimore and Chicago rounded out TheIndependent’s top five list for childless cat ladies in the US.

That means if Trump wins, Vance will live in the second most childless cat lady city in the country.

The Independent’s ranking was calculated by examining whether a city has a high numbers of single women (above 60 per cent), fewer children than the national average (under 20 per cent), and score in the top 15 cat-owning cities in the US (according to US News & World Report). Scores across the three categories were combined to determine the overall highest-ranking cities.

Chicago in the 5th spot is the only exception, with 26 per cent of children in the city but a particularly high number of single women and the third most cats in the US.

No Western cities made it to the top five: there simply aren’t enough single women in this region.

San Francisco and Seattle were also contenders for the top five childless cat lady cities. Each have low percentages of children – at 13.4 percent and 15 percent – and score eighth and fifth in cat ownership, respectively. But only 58.3 per cent and 56.8 per cent of women in those cities are single, close to the national average of 52 per cent of women who are single.

According to the latest US Census data, 76.5 per cent of women who have never married do not have children – a number which is even higher in the Northeast and West.

A 2015 nationwide survey by Nielsen Scarborough previously determined that five cities – Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Kansas City, Missouri; and Denver, Colorado – are the top places for single ladies with cats. But it did not account for cat lovers with children.

We have now updated these cities based on where the most single ladies, pet cats, and least children are.

Vance has argued that people without children should pay higher taxes and have fewer voting rights. Critics have called these and his childless cat lady comments offensive to women and couples who choose not to have children.

After backlash, Vance said his childless cat lady comments were sarcastic and were not aimed at people who forgo parenthood, but rather, at the Democratic Party’s “anti-family and anti-child” policies.