"These children are the future of this country and yet the parents who have them actually have no advantage in our democratic process," Vance said. "They have a smaller voice in some ways — in very many cases — than the people who don't have any children at all. The children who come from these families have no real representative in our democracy. Why don't we change that?"
Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, the 2024 Republican vice presidential hopeful, once argued that childless people should play a smaller part in U.S. democracy than parents, according to rumors circulating after he won the party's nomination with former U.S. President Donald Trump. Internet users dug into Vance's past comments and speeches, and claimed he had proposed a new voting system where parents, who he said have a larger stake in the future of the country, would weigh more in the functioning of U.S. democracy (archived):
(@DKDSMITH01 / X)
The claim also appeared on Facebook, Reddit and in other X posts.
As we'll see, the claim is based on fact and we have given it a "Correct Attribution" rating.
Vance made this argument at least twice in July 2021: On July 24, he gave a 35-minute speech at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's conference on the Future of American Political Economy; he then reiterated his point during a July 29 interview with then-Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson.
In his speech, he took aim at what he described as "the childless left": "I think the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing that the left has done in this country."
He named specifically, in the "next gen" of Democrats who might run for president after 2020, current U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, who was a stepmother to her husband's two children but wasn't a biological mother; Pete Buttigieg, the U.S. secretary of transportation, who in late July 2021 was less than a month away from adopting twins with his husband, Chasten Buttigieg; Cory Booker, the Democratic U.S. senator for New Jersey, who never married or had children; U.S. Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (whom he referred to as "AOC"), who in 2021 was not yet engaged to her now-fiancé Robert Riley (they agreed to marry in Puerto Rico in 2022 — archived). He said that the one thing all four of them had in common was that they didn't have children.
"Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don't have children, and why is this just a normal fact of American life that the leaders of our country should be people who don't have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children and grandchildren," Vance asked.
While he excluded from his criticism people who were unable to have children through no fault of their own, he went on to target "a political movement invested theoretically in the future of this country when not a single one of them actually has any physical commitment to the future of this country."
He added that this issue didn't come solely from the political class. "Many of the most unhappy and most miserable and most angry people in our media are childless adults," he said.
The system he proposed in the speech didn't altogether take away the vote from childless people. Instead, it gave votes to children and allowed parents to control those votes (emphasis ours):
These children are the future of this country and yet the parents who have them actually have no advantage in our democratic process. They have a smaller voice in some ways — in very many cases — than the people who don't have any children at all. The children who come from these families have no real representative in our democracy. Why don't we change that? Now some people will say this is radical and this is crazy. The Democrats are talking about giving the vote to 16-year-olds but let's do this instead: Let's give votes to all children in this country but let's give control over those votes to the parents of those children.
He went on, pre-empting concerns that this system would give more weight to parents (emphasis ours):
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. Let's face the consequences and the reality: if you don't have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn't get nearly the same voice.
Now people will say — and i'm sure The Atlantic and The Washington Post and all the usual suspects will criticize me about this in the coming days… "Well, doesn't this mean that non-parents don't have as much of a voice as parents? Doesn't this mean that parents get a bigger say in how our democracy functions?" Yes, absolutely.
His proposal is technically feasible, as the right to vote is not enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Most states already ban convicted felons from voting, while many localities dilute the voting power of minorities by redrawing districts to favor the majority — a practice known as gerrymandering. Those voting rules are typically established by states themselves, though Congress has legislated on voting rights before. Whether such a rule would work in favor of his party, however, remains to be seen, an analysis by The Washington Post suggested.
Despite his 35-minute elaboration, Vance's idea still seemed to be less a genuine policy proposal to act on than an intellectual exercise, or even a provocation. After writing his book, "Hillbilly Elegy," Vance came to political prominence using inflammatory and populistic rhetoric to attract attention.
Following the expected uproar, Vance went on Fox News to expound on left-wing childless people, exhibiting an even harder edge:
They live in one-bedroom apartments in New York City, they've played their entire lives to win a status game, they're obsessed with their jobs, they're obsessed with their wealth and with their fortunes and they look at middle America, people who are actually pretty happy with their lives and the choices that they've made and they hate normal Americans for choosing family over these ridiculous [Washington] D.C. and New York status games.
And I think because of that, they just get so angry when somebody calls it what it is. It's acceptable when they ignore that, it never happens, but when somebody calls out that "Look, if you're a miserable cat lady, you should not force your misery on the rest of the country," they just get really upset about it.