Vance's 'childless cat ladies' comment caused outrage. Here's a look at the group by the numbers

So-called "childless cat ladies" have become a major focus of the 2024 campaign after some of JD Vance’s 2021 comments reemerged.

So how many of them are there? And how important will they be in deciding who controls the White House come next year?

A new Scripps News analysis found that 33% of voting-aged women are childless. That’s about 44 million people.

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“That's a pretty high number, and it's very hard to believe that all or most of them are Democrats or Democrat-leaning independents,” said Liz Mair, a campaign strategist who has worked for Republicans.

As for the cat owners, Scripps News found there are 2.2 million cat-owning women under the age of 55 who head households and don't live with children of their own. However, some of those could become mothers whose children live elsewhere.

Also of note, 18% of married women have no kids. They are among the only demographic groups of women more likely to support Republicans than Democrats, according to a Pew Research study . Among women over 50 — a group in which Republicans are politically competitive, according to Pew — 19% are childless, Scripps News found.

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Vance has said being a father is a key attribute for male leaders in elected office. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of men over the age of 50, 23%, are childless. Trump won 50–64-year-olds in both of his previous presidential campaigns. Most of those childless older voters will never have children, according to a Census Bureau analysis which found that in 2018 16.5% of Americans past their child-rearing years had never had kids — and that those numbers are growing.

About this analysis

In order to determine both the presence of children in a household and pet ownership, Scripps News analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2021 American Housing Survey . Scripps News looked at the number and percentage of households headed by a woman, without a juvenile or adult child and with a cat. That ignores childless women where a man was listed as head of household, but includes households where a woman has grown children living outside the home.

The rest of the Scripps News analysis was based on percentages and numbers in the Census Bureau's 2022 Survey of Income and Program Participation — the data from which includes the number of biological children a respondent has. That leaves out adoptive parents but includes biological parents whose children have been adopted by another family. Overall about 1.2% of children live in adopted families, according to an analysis of Census data by the Washington Post.