In an appearance on CBS News’ Face the Nation Sunday morning, former Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley said remarks about women made by Ohio Senator JD Vance, former President Donald Trump’s running mate, were “not helpful” and represented “style” and not “substance.”
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has a commanding polling lead over Trump, the GOP’s presidential nominee, among women voters in this year’s race. Host Margaret Brennan asked Haley, a former South Carolina governor who has endorsed Trump, about Vance’s comments about women.
“Just as recently as last week, JD Vance said he’s disoriented and disturbed that the head of the most powerful teachers’ union in the country doesn’t have a single child. He continues to say things that certainly are highlighted as being offensive to women. That is going to hurt, won’t it, with female voters?” Brennan asked.
“It’s not helpful. It’s not helpful. I mean…” Haley replied, then Brennan asked, “Is he an effective messenger for the policies you say they are stronger on?”
“I think that the policy—look, you can either look at style or you can look at substance. I choose as a voter to look at substance. The style, I will say…” Haley said.
“What’s the substance of that, though?” Brennan asked.
“The substance is cutting taxes, making housing more affordable, immigration, national security, that’s the substance. The style is—no, it is not helpful to talk about whether women have children or whether they don’t. It’s not helpful to say any of those things that are personality driven or anything else. I have said that, and I will continue to say to Republicans, stop it. That’s not helpful. If you want to talk about things, stick with policy. Americans are smart. They don’t need all of this other noise to distract them. They just want to know how you’re going to help them,” Haley said.
Newsweek emailed the Trump campaign and Vance’s office for comment Sunday.
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Vance has been a fixture in headlines and faced continued backlash for his comments and views of women since he was tapped to join Trump on the Republican Party ticket.
Remarks made by Vance in 2021 while he was running for the U.S. Senate resurfaced after he was revealed as Trump’s running mate. In a Fox News interview, Vance said: “We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats” 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.”
Vance has since described this as a “sarcastic comment” that was “willfully misinterpreted” by the Democrats. He also said he regrets “that a lot of people took it the wrong way.”
The Ohio senator has also faced backlash for remarks he made about professional women, and was recently booed as he took the podium to deliver a speech to the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF).
Male and female voters have traditionally diverged in their support for political parties, with Democrats often winning more women voters, compared with their Republican opponents. But with voters’ heightened concerns about abortion rights and reproductive health care in recent election years, the gender gap has widened.
A New York Times/Siena College poll released at the beginning of August found a significant gender gap between the candidates in three key states. While Harris was winning women voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by 21 points, Trump was up among male voters by 14 points.
Melissa Deckman, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, previously told Newsweek, “We may have a larger-than-normal gender gap in 2024” and specifically highlighted the patterns already being formed among younger voters.
Last month, Haley said Republicans should “quit” whining about Harris not doing interviews with the press and get on with campaigning.
The Democratic nominee for president has faced criticism for not conducting enough interviews with the media since declaring her intention to run for the White House, especially from Trump.
But Haley, who went up against Trump in her bid to be selected as the Republican nominee, told Fox News last month: “We don’t need an interview from her, we need to take her at her word. We should not be surprised that we are now running against Kamala Harris, it was her all the time. There was no way Joe Biden, in the condition that we saw him, could take on the stresses of a presidential election. That was something I believed in then, it’s why I constantly referred back to her—because I knew that Kamala Harris was the person that we had.”
She added: “The Republican Party needs to make a serious shift here. And the first thing is, the Republican Party, Donald Trump, people here at Fox—quit complaining that she’s not giving an interview.
