JD Vance's attacks on American "cat ladies" without children is apparently beginning to take a toll on Republican men, with a male GOP candidate caught posing with a borrowed family.
Derrick Anderson, a former Army Green Beret who is running in a tight race for an open seat in Virginia's seventh congressional district, has posed in a video with what appears to be his wife and three daughters. He is also seen sitting with the four of them at a family dinner table in another campaign scene.
But he's a bachelor, has no immediate family, and lives with ... wait for it ... his dog, the New York Times was the first to discover. Anderson, 58, did just announce this month that he is engaged to be married.
Anderson's campaign is now insisting that the woman and girls who appear to be his family in the campaign scene — the actual family members of a close friend — are simply Anderson "supporters."
"Every other candidate in America are in similar pictures and video with supporters of all kinds," a spokesman told the Times — except that they aren't posed in such a way to appear to be family.
Anderson's family-member props appear to be a surprise development after vicious attacks by Donald Trump's running mate, who has lashed childless Democratic "cat ladies" like Vice President Kamala Harris (who's a stepmom to two) for somehow failing to connect to the world without kids.
Vance has also noted that the "whole purpose of the postmenopausal female" is to help their adult daughters take care of their children, and has branded "professional" women as "miserable."
Vance has never publicly attacked childless men, but Republican males like Anderson are apparently listening to his obsession with old-time gender roles of women pregnant and in the kitchen, and what he clearly views as the preeminence of heterosexual family.
The Times story on Anderson's ersatz family also focused on several other Republican candidates and politicians upping their appearances with and testimonials from their wives to give themselves a woman-friendly, family-man vibe at a time Republican legislators are working across the nation to ban abortion to force women to have babies they don't want.
Countless women's fury at losing their reproductive rights in the wake of the fall of Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court thanks to Trump's three conservative justice appointments is widely predicted to result in possibly the largest gender vote divide in American election history.
"We have a massive gender gap, approaching a gender chasm, at the top of the ticket, with women far more likely to vote for Kamala Harris and men far more likely to vote for Donald Trump," Republican strategist Whit Ayres told the Times.
"In most districts and states, there are more women registered to vote than men. It makes sense that Republicans would be trying to appeal to women, especially given the prominence of abortion."
A YouTube video in which Anderson hailed the fall of Roe v. Wade and defended politicians' right to ban women's right to abortion has been taken down.
