JD Vance’s ongoing comments about women who don’t have children, whether about “childless cat ladies” or his condemnation of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, are “not helpful” to the Trump-Vance presidential campaign, former Republican primary candidate Nikki Haley said on “Face the Nation” Sunday.
When asked if Vance has been an “effective messenger” for the duo’s policies in light of those comments, Haley answered, “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 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.”
“Americans are smart. They don’t need all this other noise to distract them. They just want to know how you’re going to help them,” Haley added.
Instead, voters should look at the records of both candidates, she argued. “You’ve got some stark contrast there. Harris was not strong on the border. Trump was strong on the border. Harris wanted to eliminate fracking. Now she’s taking that back, but energy production was not as strong as it was under the Trump administration.”
Haley also took issue with Harris’ stance on health care in the United States, specifically her past support for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All bill in 2017. Harris explained at the time, “This is about understanding, again, that health care should be a right, not a privilege. And it’s also about being smart.”
“It is so much better that people have meaningful access to affordable health care at every stage of life, from birth on. Because the alternative is that we as taxpayers otherwise are paying huge amounts of money for them to get their health care in an emergency room. So it’s not only about what is morally and ethically right, it also makes sense from a fiscal standpoint, or if you want to talk about it as a return on investment for taxpayers.”
Though Harris has not explicitly laid out a health care plan in 2024, she has walked back her previous more progressive stances on health care from both 2017 and the 2020 primary. Haley herself noted that she doesn’t support any step toward a Medicare for All system.
“When you talk about Medicare for All, when you talk about removing private health insurance, you might as well be Canada,” Haley said. “You might as well look at socialist health care. We never want to get to that point, because you’re not going to get IVF or anything else.”
In 2021, Vance attacked teaching union president Weingarten for not having children. “If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone,” Vance asserted. The comments were recently resurfaced by the Harris campaign.
On Aug. 29, Weingarten told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, “It was just a bizarre thing for him to double down on it now, because every parent and every teacher and every kid in August and September are thinking about the new year and what it means and that engagement. So he must really be disconnected from life.”
You can watch the full “Face the Nation” interview with Nikki Haley in the video above.
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