Give Sen. J.D. Vance credit for giving pollsters and data miners something new to investigate. Is there anything to his claim a few years ago that “childless cat women” are playing an outsized role in the Democratic Party?
A report on The Washington Post website didn’t go that far. But it did indicate that majorities of childless people, both men and women, do indeed identify as Democrats.
However, whether these childless people have pets does not play a significant role in party affiliation. Charts with the story say 65% of childless women who owned a cat were Democrats, while 62% of women who have neither children nor a pet are Democrats.
On the canine side, 62% of childless women with a pup are Democrats, as are 65% who have neither a child nor a dog.
Similar measures of party affiliation are closer among men. Childless males with or without a pet are in the 55% to 60% Democratic range.
The information is from a YouGov website poll of about 26,000 adults conducted at the end of June, shortly after Vance became Donald Trump’s running mate, and his comments began getting attention. YouGov obtains information from “invited internet users” whose responses are then weighted to match demographic information. Its polls are highly ranked by another website, FiveThirtyEight, so it looks like Vance at least has statistics on his side.
But that overlooks the fact that a lot of Republicans without children also do not have a cat — or a dog.
“Childless people without dogs or cats tilt almost as far left as their pet-parenting peers,” the Post reported. “The presence of pets is largely immaterial to predicting the vote — it’s all about the absence of children.”
The story assembled other data showing how children, or the lack of them, have an influence on an adult’s party preference.
An every-other-year University of Chicago survey dating back to the early 1970s showed that since the early 2000s, more Democrats did not have children. That was true for 38% of Democrats in the 2022 survey and 24% of Republicans.
Over the past half-century, the only time a larger percentage of Republicans had no children was from the early 1980s to the late 1990s.
From the University of Chicago surveys in 2020 and 2022, Democrats are more likely to be childless, no matter what their personal background. The survey measured this by gender, age, religion, race and even sexual orientation. In all 20 categories, more Democrats had no children.
Another interesting element in the story that is unrelated to children and pets: The Chicago survey indicates that in the next few years, people who describe themselves as non-religious will outnumber Protestants as Democratic and independent voters.
The non-religious percentage has been rising since the 1990s among both parties and independents, but it remains much smaller among Republicans. Protestants still make up almost 60% of GOP supporters, while that figure has fallen below 40% for Democrats and independents.
The bottom line: Don’t fault cats for adult voting habits. There’s a lot more to it.
And as the Post observed, it’s a little lazy to apply this to women who do not have children when the trends hold true for men as well.
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
