Arizona has 10,000 'childless cat lady' voters, the margin Trump lost the state by in 2020

Former President Donald Trump lost Arizona in 2020 by about 10,000 votes — which, by a conservative estimate, is roughly the same the number of women registered to vote in the state who have a cat but don't have children.

That demographic was in the spotlight this past week after a 2021 interview of vice presidential candidate JD Vance resurfaced. Talking to Tucker Carlson on Fox News, Vance said the country is run "via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by 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."

Vance said that in 2021, and told conservative media personality Megyn Kelly on Friday that he was being sarcastic and that he has nothing against cats. He also stressed that he wasn't talking about women who wanted to have children but couldn't. But he said the substance of his comment was accurate.

"It's true that we've become anti-family. It's true the left has become anti-child. It is simply true that it's become way too hard to raise a family," he said.

But given how tight political races are in Arizona, slights like the cat lady comment could hurt Trump's chances in the Grand Canyon State, according to political consultants here.

Kaylee Johannsen, a 25-year-old Phoenix resident who doesn't want children, voted for Trump in 2020.

She voted Trump, she said, because her family did. She mentioned her grandfather's Trump-stamped swim trunks. But she started questioning things when she went to college.

Vance's comment, she said, makes her want to see a woman in office.

"If you want to say hurtful things about women let us show you how we really do it," she said.

Johannsen has a cat named Evelyn that she scooped up 10 years ago in a Safeway parking lot in Surprise. Evelyn, a frightened tiny kitten, was hiding behind a car tire.

"I'm an animal nurturer," Johannsen said. "Just because I don't have a human child to care for doesn't mean that I'm not a caring person in a way that it actually matters."

About 1.2 million Arizona voters don't align with any party. Half of them are women and at least 3,400 of them have cats and no kids, according to an Arizona Republic data analysis.

About another 3,400 are Democrats and 2,700 are Republicans, along with several hundred others from smaller parties.

The actual "childless cat lady" count is certainly far greater.

The data are from L2, a research company that compiles extensive demographic information on registered voters across the nation. People are marked as cat owners if L2's sources recorded that they purchased products for cats within the last two years.

A lot of voters may not get picked up in that sweep — including this reporter, who has had her cat, Maddie, for 15 years. But according to L2 analysts, the people listed as cat owners almost certainly are.

The Republic counted about 236,700 people registered to vote in Arizona who have a cat. Most are women and at least 10,000 of the women don't have children. There are more men who have a cat but no children than women.

The L2 data also lists whether a voter has a child in the household. To account for women whose children no longer live at home, The Republic filtered out women over 48. Forty-nine is about the median age that a woman's last child turns 18, according to a Bowling Green State University study.

Undoubtedly, that means 10,000 cat lady voters in Arizona is an undercount. It doesn't include Karen Wakefield, a 72-year-old lifelong cat-lover who tried but could not have children.

Wakefield, who lives in Tempe with her Tortoiseshell cat Lucy, worked at a Montessori School for about a decade. She loved the children there, who were delighted by a previous cat named Jack who came to school with her.

The Arizona Republic loves cats: See who's behind the scenes of our reporting.

Jack, a Ragdoll with piercing blue eyes, recently died. He was 18. Her neighbors sent her condolence cards.

"How could you say I don’t have children? I have 382 of them," Wakefield said of Vance's comment, referring to her school children. Wakefield is not registered to any party.

"Maybe JD should get a kitten," she said. "Oh no, that would be too bad for the kitten wouldn’t it? I hope that man doesn’t have any animals."

The Trump campaign responded to a request for comment with an emailed statement from Vance's spokesperson, Taylor Van Kirk.

"Once again, the leftwing media have twisted Senator Vance's words and spun up a false narrative about his position on the issue," Van Kirk said.

Tamara Wright, who lives near downtown Phoenix, said she read Vance's book "Hillbilly Elegy" and felt connected to it because she grew up lower-income. But her views about him changed when he moved into politics.

Wright, 42, said she might have voted for a Republican if the party hadn't nominated Trump. She switched her registration from independent to Republican for the presidential preference election to vote for Nikki Haley. She has since switched back.

"I am not going to vote for a malignant narcissist Donald Trump who says horrible, vile, racist sexist things and then JD Vance just sort of doubled down on that," she said. She's never cast a vote for Trump in any past elections. "I feel like they're losing potential voters that actually would like to get some things done and find a middle ground in terms of policy. When the Republican Party does this, it totally takes somebody like me out."

Wright has no children and has a Siamese cat named Reznor — named after Trent Reznor of the Nine Inch Nails — who plays fetch, snuggles and bites when he gets the zoomies.

The Arizona Republic called about 100 women for this article, mostly registered non-partisans and Republicans. Republicans who answered the phone asked not to be quoted. One said she didn't find Vance's comment offensive and criticized a reporter for asking more about her views.

Nicole Marquez — a 51-year-old independent voter who moved from downtown Phoenix to the West Valley to care for her mother several years ago — said Vance's comment won't affect her vote for president.

"I don't care about hype," she said.

She's never had children and has a 7-year-old cat named Lucky that travels with her and her husband. All three are spending the summer in Italy. The cat goes to cafes in Tuscany. She's been to Assisi, Ostuni, Pompeii, Pisa and Chianni. She'll visit Switzerland next.

Marquez volunteered for Barack Obama's first campaign and was a registered Democrat. She switched to independent after his first term. The most important thing for her is immigration and its effect on health systems. She said she used to schedule doctor visits related to her cancer much easier but now competes for time slots with people from other countries. She wants a more secure border.

She won't vote for Kamala Harris. She's stuck between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Trump, she said. And she thought Vance's comment was funny.

"Cat people can't have thin skin," she said in a text message. "We'd bleed to death lol."

Paul Bentz, a pollster for the Arizona political consulting firm HighGround, said the speculation is that Trump chose Vance to solidify his base, which doesn't necessarily broaden the campaign's reach.

"If he's only a net-base builder to begin with, any comment attacking any group certainly is detrimental," Bentz said.

Though he's not sure the cat lady insult is enough to influence how people vote when an issue as big as abortion is on the ballot.

"It's another misstep by a campaign that continues to be not thoughtful of these critical swing audiences," he said.

Lorna Romero Ferguson, a Republican political strategist who worked for John McCain, said the impact of Vance's comment goes beyond childless cat ladies and speaks to a larger audience of women in general and men who are sympathetic to women's issues.

Vance's remarks imply there is something wrong with women who don't live the "JD Vance norm," an antiquated view that is going to turn people off, she said.

"You don't see these comments being made toward men who are unmarried," Romero Ferguson said.

She said two weeks ago she was certain Trump would win Arizona. Now, not so much — especially if Harris chooses Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., as her vice presidential running mate.

"There is that swing demographic of highly-educated women, the Ducey-Sinema voters, the people who voted against Kari Lake in 2022, there is a certain demographic where comments like this are not going to help the Trump-Vance campaign," she said.

"The Trump-Vance campaign needs to be very careful of how they speak about women."

Cats as a symbol of women's rights

This is not the first time a Republican has mocked single women with cats.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., responded to abortion-rights protesters in 2022 by questioning how many of them were "over-educated, under-loved millennials who sadly return from protests to a lonely microwave dinner with their cats, and no Bumble matches.”

That prompted Phoenix resident Jennifer Ling Datchuk to launch an art exhibit called "Karma is a cat," which displayed in a New York City gallery at the end of 2023. The name of the project is a nod to a Taylor Swift lyric and also explores the cat as a symbol of women's rights.

Some anti-suffrage material depicted men taking care of kids at home with a cat as the symbol of them losing their masculinity. One postcard from 1909 read: "I want to vote but my wife won't let me."

But by 1916, suffragists claimed the cat imagery, as two suffragists adopted a cat on a campaign trip and made it their mascot, according to the National Park Service.

Ling Datchuk's work included bells on loops big enough for a person to wear, modeled after the bells people put on their cats' collars. The bells are fleshy skin colors that you might see among porcelain dolls, to "represent all of us," she said.

"Politicians want to play into that single-cat lady trope," she said. "We are also such a large voting demographic, we also have disposable income and we have the power to mobilize."

Her exhibit's webpage says of the porcelain bells: "They will hear us coming and continue to fear us because karma is a cat."

Ling Datchuk, 44, recently moved to Phoenix from Texas — where she was a registered Democrat — with her husband after several miscarriages. Each miscarriage brought not only a crushing sadness but a fear that she wouldn't get proper, life-saving healthcare. Texas bans abortion at six weeks except for medical emergencies, and doctors can face criminal prosecution for performing them.

Reproductive rights are on the Arizona ballot in November, which will be Ling Datchuk's first election as an Arizona voter. The issue is not on the ballot in Texas.

The couple has tried to have a child through in vitro fertilization.

They have a cat, Shoji Hamada, named after a renowned Japanese potter.

Ling Datchuk pushed back on Vance's assumption that "childless cat ladies" are miserable.

"I just came back from a two week craft camp. And we all were talking about this. And we're all cat lovers," she said. "We all have multifaceted identities and what we are miserable about are these oppressive laws that men keep making to keep women back."

Reach the reporter Caitlin McGlade at [email protected] or on X @caitmcglade.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona voters who are 'childless cat ladies' could impact election