Given the negative blowback that hasn’t let up since it resurfaced, vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance doubtless regrets his sarcastic allusion to elite female Democrats, including Kamala Harris, as “childless cat ladies” in a 2021 interview with then Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Vance reached for the trope to characterize women “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.” He also wondered aloud how it could be a “normal fact of American life” that the country is run by childless political leaders “who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it.”