Attention, women: JD Vance keeps telling the world what he thinks of you. It's not great

Donald Trump could have used his vice presidential pick to try to chip away at what was already a substantial gender gap when the race was Trump vs. President Joe Biden. Trump did not do that. Confident in his polling lead against Biden and ready to double down on Project 2025, Trump chose Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who, despite being married with children, gives off extremely strong incel vibes. (How strong? The velocity with which couch jokes took off tells the tale.)

Then Trump found himself facing Vice President Kamala Harris instead of Biden, and that gender gap – well, it's looking very significant in many polls. Meanwhile, Vance appears to be trying to outdo Trump, an adjudicated rapist, when it comes to alienating women voters.

Consider two of this week's revelations about how Vance sees women.

Heartland Signal ran a story about a 2020 podcast interview in which Vance agreed with the host that "the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female in theory" is to care for their grandchildren and that free childcare from grandparents is a "weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman."

Hey there, ladies over 52 or so. Forget about your own lives. The only reason for you to exist is to take care of children so the people whose lives matter can do stuff that matters. 

As it happens, somewhat over 50% of voters are over age 50. Republicans skew older than Democrats, but you'd think it's still a bad idea telling the large number of women over 50 who vote regularly that, having likely spent years raising their own kids, their lives aren't just not their own to do with as they will but are actually meaningless other than for childcare.

The steady stream of past Vance attacks on "childless cat ladies" and other groups of women he finds distasteful is one thing. The Trump vetting team had the opportunity to uncover those comments and weigh them against Vance's positives, whatever those might be. But Vance isn't done yet. 

In a Wednesday evening chat, Fox News host Laura Ingraham posed the following question:

“One of my dear friends said to me tonight that all these suburban women—all they care about is abortion, and they don’t understand the decision is with the states now. It’s not banned nationally, even if some people want it to be banned nationally. What do you say to suburban women out there who are marinating in this propaganda?”

Ingraham at least understood that women do care about abortion rights, even if she did suggest that those silly ladies don't get that abortion bans are state, not federal policies while glossing over the sheer number of states with harsh abortion restrictions.

Vance, however, replied by rejecting the idea that suburban women even care about abortion.

“Well, first of all, I don’t buy that, Laura. I think most suburban women care about the normal things that most Americans care about, right?” he replied. “They care about inflation, they care about the price of groceries, they care about public safety in the streets where their kids play.”

"Normal things"? I dunno, JD, a lot of women consider bodily autonomy to be a normal thing to care about. One in four women in the U.S. will have an abortion during their lives. It's not a majority, certainly, but it's not some abnormal experience, and plenty of women realize that their right to an abortion is important even if they hope never to exercise it. States with abortion bans without meaningful exceptions are proving every day how important this is, as they risk women's lives and health by denying care during miscarriages and even ectopic pregnancies.

Did Vance sleep through 2022, with its red wave that wasn't and its string of state ballot measures protecting abortion rights in one way or another? Has he not looked at the list of states with related ballot measures coming up in 2024? Nevada and Arizona, two key battlegrounds, are on that list. A relatively small number of people motivated to vote to defend reproductive freedom could swing either or both of those states, and those states could matter in the close election that's expected.

If Vance really wants to be out here insulting one group of women after another, diminishing their hopes and their fears alike, I guess all there really is to say is … Please proceed, senator.