Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance compared Vice President Kamala Harris to a teenage beauty pageant on Thursday.
In response to Harris’ first interview with a professional reporter since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, Vance posted an infamous clip of the Miss Teen USA contestant struggling to answer a question in 2007.
“BREAKING: Got the full Kamala Harris CNN interview,” Vance wrote on social media, including a video of then-18-year-old Caitlin Upton stuttering incoherently through an answer about why some Americans apparently can’t find the United States on a map.
Upton, an honor student, was widely mocked for her response in 2007. In a later interview, she said she just froze. “Personally, my friend and I know exactly where the United States is on the map,” he said.
It’s notable that presidential candidate Harris is compared to an old clip of a teenager in a beauty pageant — an inherently gendered activity that often carries the false stereotype that the contestants are ignorant or stupid. Although Upton’s puzzling response made headlines at the time, she hasn’t been in the public eye since.
In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Harris said his “values haven’t changed” even as he has moved away from some of the more progressive positions he took in the 2019 and 2020 Democratic primaries, such as the Green New Deal.
“I’ve always believed and worked on the fact that the climate crisis is real, that it’s an urgent issue to which we should apply metrics that include meeting deadlines,” Harris said.
Harris is only the second woman to run for president of a major political party, but Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked her intelligence and suggested she used sexual favors to advance her political career. In his joking post on Thursday, Vance appears to lean toward such a personal attack — not that he’s new to mean comments.
In 2021, when he was running for the Senate, Vance described Harris and other top Democrats as “childless cat ladies” who are unhappy because they don’t have children. On Wednesday, he said he “can go to hell.”
It’s probably no coincidence that according to opinion polls, female voters support the Democratic ticket by as much as 16 percentage points. Reproductive health care has been a major campaign issue, and Trump has tried to bridge the gap by softening the Republican Party’s anti-abortion rhetoric and pledging support for IVF, which is at risk due to right-wing court rulings.
