By
A viral clip on social media shows Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, proposing that people with children be given more voting power than people without kids.
On the heels of widespread denunciation of Vance’s past condemnation of Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies,” the footage underscores the Ohio senator’s ire toward people without children. But there’s more to the story.
The clip is from a 2021 speech that Vance gave to a conservative organization called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. At one point, Vance offered up an unusual idea about voting:
Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power — you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic — than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality: If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.
The reason I said there’s more to the story than Vance’s disdain for childless people is this proposal also epitomizes the Republican Party’s growing embrace of openly antidemocratic policies.
As The Federalist noted at the time, Vance’s remarks — in which he also said that people without children have “no physical commitment to the future of this country” — came amid his praise for Hungary’s far-right authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán, who’s seen as a hero among Trumpian Republicans. In fact, as The Guardian noted back in 2011, Orbán’s Fidesz party proposed the controversial idea but the legislation didn’t pass.
[A] University of Chicago law professor, Tom Ginsburg, an expert on new democracies and co-founder of the Comparative Constitutions project, said the concept dated back to before universal suffrage and the belief that certain people, such as landowners, white males or church figures, have more of a stake in the governance of society.
“This is unprecedented in a democratic constitution, and harkens back to 19th-century use of property qualifications to restrict the franchise,” said Ginsburg. “Over-weighting votes for those with families undermines the political rights of those who choose not to have families.”
The Guardian notes that the proposal is known as “Demeny voting” because of demographer Paul Demeny, who popularized the idea in the 1980s. Demeny’s work is known for its obsessive focus on fertility rates and immigration and has been criticized by researchers, who have associated it with historical racist rhetoric aimed at curtailing immigration. If you read my Tuesday Tech Drop last week, you know promoting ideas from such figures is nothing new for Vance.
So, yes, Vance’s remarks about voting put his cruelty toward childless people on display. But they also demonstrated his aversion to democracy — and his disturbing embrace of theories promoted by Orbán's far-right political party.