When Donald Trump announced that J.D. Vance was going to be his running mate, I can personally attest, more than a few pro-family policy wonks in Washington, DC, sent off “hurrahs” and “hosannas” via text and direct messages. When you work on marriage and family issues, you learn who on Capitol Hill is anti-family, who is pro-family in name only, and who will rise to the occasion, rebuff the lobbyists, and vote for policies that make it easier to get married, have kids, and raise them.
Members of that last group are shamefully rare, but they do exist. But rarer still are politicians who have a sophisticated understanding of the legislation at issue, who can weigh its strengths and weaknesses against an informed view about family policy’s proper objectives that they personally hold. Vance is one of them.
Many senators on the left have a vision of family policy, too. Vance disagrees with it. So, we could be having a debate about which one is better suited for the American people, and on what grounds. Instead, we are down the rabbit hole of an electronically fragmented public discourse, in which we are being memed into believing that Vance’s views on family policy are reducible to a hatred for “childless cat ladies.”
“Vance pushed back by pointing to differences over family policy.”
This, to be sure, is a pungent turn of phrase, but it is also telling that, in several recent interviews, when challenged on what he meant by it, Vance pushed back by pointing to differences over family policy. “Why do we have masking of toddlers years after the pandemic ended?” he asked in a recent interview with Megyn Kelly. “Why do we have the Harris campaign coming out this very morning … and saying that we should not have the child tax credit, which lowers tax rates of parents with young children?” Because, Vance said, Democrats have “become anti-family, anti-kid.” Indeed, “It’s built into their policy.”
The childless-cat-lady clip was snipped from a larger address in which Vance leveled criticism toward Republicans and Democrats alike. Republicans, Vance charged, should no longer fail to take up the mantle of being a genuinely pro-family party (in word and policy); as for Democrats, he asserted that the party’s policy vision is informed by its tendency toward childlessness. This should sting both sides of the aisle, because, like it or not, he is right on both counts.
The prevailing view among Republicans for decades has been that the government shouldn’t support marriage and family directly, because to do so would be to empower Big Government. In January 2022, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) encapsulated this view when, commenting on legislation to extend the child tax credit, he said: “I’ve never really felt it was society’s responsibility to take care of other people’s children.” Vance has broken with this reigning sentiment, and his genuine support for family policy—shared by several other notably younger Republicans in the senate—is part of an epochal change within the party.
As for Vance’s assertion of pervasive childlessness among Democrats, it’s unfortunately a fact. An analysis of the 2022 General Social Survey shows that by a wide margin, Democrats are more likely to be childless than Republicans: 51 percent versus 36 percent, respectively.
This is critical to Vance’s larger point. Parents and nonparents have proved to have differing interests and will have differing policy preferences as a result. Consider a 2021 American Compass-YouGov survey that found that, when asked to rank a range of family policies by preference, childless women selected paid family leave as their top priority. Mothers, by contrast, prioritized direct cash assistance.
In a question about how the child tax credit should be structured, a 2022 survey by the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Institute for Family Studies, where I am executive director, found a similar divergence: 58 percent of adults without an 18-year-old in the house (a wider category that includes the childless) preferred that the benefit per child be $2,000 per year or smaller, while 60 percent of parents with a child younger than 18 at home preferred it be $3,600 per year or larger. Similarly, a majority of such parents supported a policy that would provide money for making down payments on a house for families of three or more children, whereas it was supported by only 36 percent of those without a child in the home.
The United States needs family policy. Fertility and marriage rates have cratered, especially among the poor and working class. We can’t survive like this. Vance is arguing that family policy needs to flow from the needs and preferences of parents. Whether or not he is right about that is the debate we should be having. I think he is.