Headed into this year’s only vice presidential debate, Sen. JD Vance has some work to do: Most recent polling suggests the voters who know the Ohio Republican don’t much care for him.
As we discussed last week, the latest NBC News poll found that 32% of American have a favorable impression of the Ohioan, while 45% gave him a negative rating. Among all of the people included in the national survey, literally no one finished below Vance.
Much of this likely stems from Vance’s unfortunate comments about “childless cat ladies” and related rhetoric about American families without children, coupled with his metamorphosis on Donald Trump.
But that’s not the GOP vice presidential nominee’s only problem. The New York Times reported:
[O]n Friday, footage circulated on social media showing Mr. Vance asserting in a Senate hearing last year that car-seat regulations had driven down the number of babies born, drawing mockery from his critics.
In March 2023 — at which point Vance’s career in elected office spanned roughly two months — the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on consumer protections in air travel. The panel’s newest and youngest member spent some time exploring cost-benefit analyses.
“What I worry here is that in the name of safety improvements — and I don’t doubt that there are marginal safety improvements — we’re actually proposing a change that would make things much, much more miserable for parents for very little marginal improvement in safety,” Vance said.
The Republican then pivoted to familiar ground. “One thing that I really worry about, and I think both Democrats and Republicans should worry about, is we have some real demographic problems in our country,” Vance added. “American families aren’t having enough children. And I think there’s evidence that some of the things that we’re doing to parents is driving down the number of children that American families are having. In particular, there’s evidence that the car seat rules that we’ve imposed — which, of course, I want kids to drive in car seats — have driven down the number of babies born in this country by over 100,000.”
In other words, as far as the Republican senator was concerned last year, there’d be over 100,000 more Americans were it not for Americans’ concerns related to “car seat rules.”
When USA Today asked Vance’s team last week to substantiate the claim, the newspaper did not get a response. The Times also didn’t get a comment.
In fairness, the Times’ report pointed to research that suggested car seats might’ve had some effect on American birth rates, but the article also quoted John S. Santelli, a professor of population and family health at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, who seemed skeptical.
“As a pediatrician who studies U.S. and global fertility, I see no scientific evidence that regulations around car seats or use of car seats reduces birthrates,” he said. “They do help kids survive motor vehicle accidents.”
I don’t imagine we’ve heard the last of this one.
