Alaska’s U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski has long been a critic and skeptic of former President Donald Trump, and his weird pick for vice president hasn’t changed that.
In comments to Politico, Alaska’s senior Republican senator slammed resurfaced comments by her party’s vice presidential nominee, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, about “childless cat ladies” as “offensive to many women” and harmful to the Republican Party as a whole.
“To be so derogatory in this way is offensive to me as a woman,” she told the outlet.
Vance’s comments come from 2021 when he accused the Democratic Party of being run 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.” The comments are one of the many rallying points that Democrats have locked onto since Vance joined Trump’s ticket, painting Vance and the Republican Party as “weird.”
Other Republican legislators have tried to brush past the comments, and Trump has tried to downplay them as a sign of Vance’s strong support for families. Vance has also accused people without biological children as “sociopathic” and “less mentally stable” than those with children.”
Murkowski told Politico that the comments aren’t helping the party.
“If the Republican Party is trying to improve its image with women, I don’t think that this is working,” Murkowski told Politico, calling Vance’s comments unfortunate, unnecessary and “offensive to many women.”
Alaska U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan hasn’t commented on Vance’s comments, but in an interview after the announcement about Vance, Sullivan said he was “a strong, strong pick” and that Vance is a “good friend.”
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
