Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty
The internet has been burning up this past week with the many, many faux pas—faux paws?—of Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, what with his “childless cat ladies” thing, his endorsement of a reprehensible book by a reprehensible guy, and the foreword Vance wrote for yet another book, by Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts, even as Trump was trying to distance himself from that political dumpster fire.
It is fun, however, to take some of Vance’s more ridiculous assertions at face value, such as his claim that “the entire Democrat Party is like this childless cabal of people who don’t really care about the future.” (You didn’t think the Harris campaign was going to let that one go by, did you?)
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—whom Vance namechecked as “childless” even as Buttigieg and his husband were in the midst of adopting a child—made the case quite eloquently to Jon Stewart that being childless and caring about your country’s future are not mutually exclusive. Exhibit A: The young people who volunteer for military service. Watch:
And then it’s worth asking: Is there even truth to this notion of Democrats being childless? I wasn’t about to waste my time looking up every member of Congress, but I did want to run a little truthiness test. So I looked up the parental status of every member of the House of Representatives from my liberal state of California—also the nation’s most populous state.
California has 52 House members: 40 Democrats, 12 Republicans.
Forty percent of those Democrats are women and only 16 percent of the Republicans are. Given the rigors of public office and the fact that moms are often saddled with the lion’s share of child care duties, you might then expect an overall higher rate of childlessness among the Democratic politicians. But you would be wrong.
With the caveat that one of the Democratic women has stepchildren, not biological ones, 85 percent of the Dems have kids, as opposed to 83 percent of the Republicans. If you exclude Rep. Sydney Kai Kamlager-Dove’s stepkids, which isn’t very nice, it becomes even: 83 percent for both.
For a reality check, I also looked at Georgia’s House delegation—9 Republicans, 5 Democrats. All of them have had kids except one: a Republican.
Let’s break down those numbers. On the Democratic side, 88 percent of the male reps have kids and 81 percent of the women do—three-quarters if you exclude the poor stepkids. The Cali Republicans have only two women in their caucus—both with kids—while 8 of the 10 men have them. (And, to be fair, one of the childless ones was just recently married.)
The remaining childless Republican dude, a MAGA type known for his adamant opposition to abortion rights and LGBTQ rights, tried to tell local police back in 1993 that he and the prostitute he was doing stuff with in his car were “just talking.” (He later admitted they were having sex.) But debauchery has no party affiliation: In 1986, one of the childless male Dems had been cited by police for soliciting prostitution.
The other two childless Democratic men are openly gay, and of the four Democratic women with no biological children, one is 35 and unmarried—though in a relationship, so who knows? We don’t know the story with the others, and even Vance concedes that plenty of people who want kids can’t have them for all sorts of reasons.
So what is this guy even talking about? Based on my California House sample, Dems are no more likely to be childless than Republicans are. I would predict the national numbers aren’t much different—there’s a fun weekend project if any of my media colleagues want to take it on.
For a reality check, though, I looked at Georgia’s House delegation—nine Republicans, five Democrats. Republican Andrew Clyde, a firearms dealer, is the only one of them who hasn’t had kids, although he does have a doberman named Kit. Georgia Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath, who is Black, used to have a child. She ran for Congress only after her son, Jordan, was murdered at a gas station by a 46-year-old white man complaining about Jordan and his friends’ “loud music.”
The upshot of this little experiment, I suppose, is that if America’s childless are indeed some sort of cabal, it would appear to be pretty minor—and bipartisan. But a hearty thank you to JD for making it all possible.
