Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance likened Vice President Kamala Harris to a teenage beauty pageant contestant on Thursday.
In response to Harris’ first sit-down interview with a professional journalist since becoming Democrats’ presidential nominee, Vance posted an infamous clip of a Miss Teen USA contestant struggling to answer a question in 2007.
“BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview,” Vance wrote on social media, attaching a video of then-18-year-old Caitlin Upton stammering incoherently through an answer about why some Americans supposedly can’t find the U.S. on a map.
Upton, an honor student, was widely ridiculed for her answer in 2007. In an interview afterward, she said she just froze up. “Personally, my friends and I, we know exactly where the United States is on a map,” she said then.
Comparing Harris, a presidential candidate, to an old clip of a teenager at a beauty pageant — an inherently gendered activity, which often carries the false stereotype that contestants are ignorant or silly — is notable. While Upton’s fumbling response made headlines at the time, she has not been in the public eye since.
In her interview with CNN on Thursday, Harris said her “values have not changed” even though she’s moved away from some of the more progressive positions she took during the Democratic primary in 2019 and 2020, such as the Green New Deal.
“I have always believed, and I have worked on it, that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter, to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time,” Harris said.
Harris is only the second woman nominated for president by a major political party, but Donald Trump has repeatedly assailed her intelligence and insinuated she used sexual favors to advance her political career. With his joking post on Thursday, Vance seems to be leaning into that kind of personal attack ― not that nasty comments are new for him.
In 2021, when he was running for Senate, Vance described Harris and other top Democrats as “childless cat ladies” who are miserable because they don’t have children. On Wednesday, he said she “can go to hell.”
It’s probably not a coincidence that polling suggests women voters favor the Democratic ticket by as much as 16 percentage points. Reproductive health care has been a major campaign topic, and Trump has tried to close the gap by softening the Republican Party’s anti-abortion rhetoric and pledging to support IVF fertility treatment jeopardized by right-wing court decisions.
