Lady Cat Owners

Jun 30, 2024

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How costly could JD Vance’s attacks on non-parents be in November?

Childless Cat Ladies (CCLs) have been attacked repeatedly over the past two weeks. We wanted to shine a light on this often overlooked key demographic group. Using L2’s DataMapping and Haystaq’s Harris approval score we took a look at the 111 million women voters who will decide this election. We narrowed our selection to those with no children. That’s over 55 million women in the United States that do not have children.

Lastly we limited our selection to those who had a cat in the home and found about 4 million voters spread across the political spectrum. Cat owners in general tend to be older, more female, and more likely to be unmarried. With that said, women are also a (comparable) majority of dog owners and less than a quarter are unmarried. A majority of CCLs are actually Republican among those registered with a party (43% Republican, 35% Democrat) and far more are married Republicans than single Democrats.

Note: As the pet information is commercially purchased, it is probably underestimating the true ownership of cats.

Childless Cat Ladies are a significant fraction of the electorate, enough to sway election outcomes. Almost 3%—or 2 million—of the Republican base are CCLs. There are nearly 200,000 CCLs in Ohio alone, nearly Vance’s margin of victory in his 2022 Senate election. Assuming 90% of Republican CCLs voted for Trump in 2020, they alone gave Donald Trump North Carolina in 2020. These same margins in the other direction would have won the entire election for Donald Trump by flipping Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.

Looking ahead to 2024, Kamala Harris has more room to grow her support from CCLs than the Trump-Vance ticket does. Using Haystaq’s Kamala Harris Approval score, we find Harris starts with a lower approval rating from CCLs by about 5%. Put differently, the Trump-Vance ticket has more to lose among CCLs who are a more favorable voting bloc—a worrying sign for Vance’s anti-CCL rhetorical strategy.

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