Taylor Swift has endorsed Kamala Harris, calling herself a 'childless cat lady' in reference to a disparaging comment vice presidential candidate JD Vance made about Democrats. But new Ipsos data shows that childless women with cats largely match up with the rest of America.
The Ipsos Consumer Tracker asks Americans questions about culture, the economy and the forces that shape our lives. Here's one thing we learned this week.
September 12, 2024 - Why we asked about childless women with cats: Taylor Swift has endorsed Kamala Harris for president, after months of speculation on when and how the world's biggest pop star would weigh in to the 2024 election. And she did it via an Instagram post of herself holding one of her cats, signing her endorsement "childless cat lady."
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It adds yet another wrinkle to one of the odd side stories of election 2024, a quote from Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance. According to NPR, “In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then-Senate-candidate Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too." That and some other comments he made led to an odd trope of “Childless Cat Ladies for Kamala.” Which then turned into an actual activist group with a Zoom call featuring Nancy Pelosi and of course a T-shirt.
But we wondered, is that a fair generalization? What are the political leanings of childless cat ladies? What are the demographics of this demographic?
What we found: Turns out childless cat ladies are … much like everyone else, demographically. They’re largely suburban, most have at least some college education. They are disproportionally white but income-wise, they have a pretty normal distribution. And perhaps most importantly, one in three (31%) childless cat ladies identify as Republican (vs. 36% of everyone else.) They are only 4pts more likely to say they are Democrats (40%) than everyone else. If you’re wondering, they make up around 10% of the population.
Now, there are a couple of caveats. “Childless” in our definition means they don’t have kids living at home. They could indeed have adult children. And we are including cat owners who might indeed ALSO have other pets, like dogs or gerbils or even one person who said they had a pet Siberian fox. But Sen. Vance didn’t specify that they would only have cats either, so I think we’re OK there.
How would you appeal to Childless Cat Ladies if you were a candidate? For this, we turn to the cross tabby-lations with the rest of this wave of the Ipsos Consumer Tracker. Turns out, there are some differences in attitudes. They are less likely to think Trump will improve access to abortion and reproductive health than everybody else (and not that many think Trump will help on those issues to start with). They are much more likely to be buying ready-to-eat or hot meals from the grocery store at roughly the same rates as a year ago, so they’re sticking to their cooking routines. Religion and faith are less important to them, but so is being a sports fan.
Since we didn’t ask how they plan to vote, puuuurrrrrhaps they are in play as voters. So campaigns should lean into messaging about meal planning, skip the appeals to faith (in higher powers or sports teams), and of course incorporate lots of cat videos in their rallies.
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Source: Ipsos
