With Vance’s elevation, Pennsylvania voters reexamine Trump’s views on women

BUCKS COUNTY, Pa. - More than a week after Kamala Harris’s debut as the likely Democratic presidential nominee, the buzz around her candidacy is still fresh here in the collar counties surrounding Philadelphia. Though many voters acknowledged they know little about her or her ideas, they used words like “exciting” and “energizing” to describe the political moment.

But the politician everyone really wanted to talk about was Sen. JD Vance, with his selection as former president Donald Trump’s running mate sparking a new chapter in the long-running conversation about Trump’s views of women.

Vance’s comments from 2021 suggesting that Americans without children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country’s future went viral days ago. But unfortunately for Trump, the maelstrom surrounding his running mate is still stirring in this perennial battleground. In interviews with more than two dozen voters, it was clear that Vance’s views have renewed unease about Trump’s judgment, his past statements about women and his record on abortion. Almost universally, voters also said they were bracing for Trump to unleash personal attacks on Harris.

“Now that you’ve got Kamala in there, you’ve got a whole different ballgame,” said Mike Dumin, a 68-year-old independent from Lansdale. “He is going to attack her in ways that are going to be distasteful to most normal people except his base. He can’t help himself. He cannot stand the fact that it’s a woman, especially a woman who is a minority who could beat him.”

Dumin said that Vance’s past comments suggest that the senator from Ohio “wants obedient servants at home just having babies” and that his public interactions with his wife, Usha, an accomplished lawyer who spoke at the recent Republican National Convention but has kept a low profile, should tell Americans everything they need to know: “That’s what he pushes. That’s who he is. And this is coming from a man,” Dumin said.

“High heels and lipstick,” interjected his wife, Susan Dumin, a 68-year-old retired florist. When Trump and Vance’s positions on abortion enter the conversation, she said, “Women are terrified. We are 50 percent, and we are letting the other half decide our health care.”

In a strange stroke of political timing, America’s reintroduction to Harris, now at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, has coincided with the vetting of Vance. That has meant voters are revisiting the possibility of the first female president at the same time that Vance is drawing scrutiny of his views on traditional marriage, the role of women in the home and his opposition to abortion, including in the case of rape and incest.

Cognizant of the negative reception that some of Vance’s views have earned, Trump has defended his running mate even as members of his party second-guess his decision. In a recent interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Trump said Vance “loves family” and went on to defend Americans who don’t have children: “I know so many people. They never met the right person,” Trump said. “They’re every bit as good as anybody else that has the most beautiful family.”

When asked whether Vance would be ready to be president on day one during a Wednesday interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago, Trump noted that vice-presidential picks historically have had very little bearing on the outcome of presidential races.

By including Harris - who has two stepchildren - in his 2021 description of ascendant Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable,” Vance seems to have triggered anger not only among voters who support her, but also among swing voters, who suddenly feel inspired to defend her.

“Talking about why Kamala doesn’t have any kids - that was very disrespectful,” said Noris Lugo, a 53-year-old teacher from Montgomery Township, who noted that Vance would have no idea whether a woman has been unable to bear children or has made a choice not to. Before the sudden upheaval caused by President Biden’s withdrawal from the race, Lugo was leaning toward voting for Trump because she believes he is good for the economy.

Now, Lugo said, she is more heavily weighing how the former president “treats people” and is concerned that Vance and Trump “have the same behavior and thinking.” Disrespect for women - “that’s the one thing I don’t tolerate,” she said.

Stephanie Crossier, a 32-year-old teacher from Doylestown, leans Republican and believes Democrats have gone too far to the left on abortion. But she has positive impressions of Harris thus far and said she is struggling as she evaluates whether someone with Trump’s ethics should serve as commander in chief.

“Trump has things on his record that shouldn’t be there for a president. The legal run-ins,” Crossier said, alluding to his recent conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records in a hush money trial, as well as his other pending criminal trials.

Rosemary O’Connor, a 73-year-old former Amtrak employee from Bedminster, said she was relieved that the scrutiny of Vance has “revitalized” the conversation around Trump.

“People got immune to Trump; they just shrug him off,” said O’Connor, who changed her registration from Republican to Democrat after Trump was elected because she no longer felt the party reflected her values. With Vance, she said, “we’re getting a new take on their views.”

Vance argues that the media has twisted his past statements. Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s communications director, insisted that the former president is “thrilled with the choice he made.”

“Kamala Harris is weak, failed, and dangerously liberal, and no amount of gaslighting from her or her campaign will erase her despicable record,” Cheung said in a statement.

But Trump has been complicating the GOP’s effort to steer the conversation about Harris in a more substantive direction - to scrutiny of her record on immigration and policing, for example. During the NABJ interview, Trump questioned Harris’s racial identity - asking whether she was Indian or Black before stating that she just recently “became a Black person.” Harris dismissed his false claims about her race as “the same old show,” which she described as “divisiveness” and “disrespect.”

Still, impressions of Harris among swing voters here remain fluid. Voters often struggled to recall specific aspects of her record or her biography, creating an opportunity for both sides as they try to define her with millions of dollars of television ads. Trump and Harris are tied in Pennsylvania, according to The Washington Post’s polling average. Harris led Trump by seven points among suburban voters in a head-to-head matchup in a Fox News poll last week. That is much narrower advantage than the double-digit lead that Biden held with suburban voters in the Fox poll in October 2020. Ultimately Biden won the state by only one point.

Rachel Siegel, a 32-year-old aesthetician from Fountainville, said she didn’t vote in 2020 because she was undecided between Biden and Trump. But she has found Harris’s demeanor off-putting and described the economy during the past four years as “absolute garbage.”

Both Siegel and her mother, Sonia McAfee, 63, questioned whether Harris is strong enough for the role of president. McAfee said Trump “scares” her when it comes to international affairs, but she is leaning toward voting for him because she doesn’t think Harris “is what we need right now.” The main criticism McAfee has heard about Harris is that she was not effective in curbing illegal immigration in her role as vice president. (Although Republicans have described Harris as the “border czar,” she was tasked with a narrower role addressing the root causes of migration out of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras).

“You feel like you have to look up everything in both parties, because everybody calls each other liars and ultimately you don’t know the truth,” said McAfee, a retired accountant. “VPs sort of end up in the background, so I don’t really know what she’s capable of.”

McAfee said Vance has seemed “knowledgeable” but “ought to watch how he says things.” Both women have been disappointed that much of the discussion around Harris’s ascent has centered on race and gender.

“I don’t like that people throw out the race card - that she’d be the first Black woman [as president] - I don’t care,” McAfee said. “You’ve got to prove to me that you can do the job.”

Scott Clement contributed to this report.