Washington (AP) Cat owners dominated the run-up to the 2024 election. The dogs did, however, have their day in the end.
According to AP VoteCast, a survey of over 120,000 voters, President-elect Donald Trump received a little over half of voters who own either cats or dogs, with a significant boost among dog owners. Compared to Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, dog owners were significantly more inclined to vote the Republican. Owners of cats were divided between the two contenders.
Approximately two-thirds of voters reported owning a dog or cat, yet politicians typically pay little attention to pet owners. This year, however, Taylor Swift’s September Instagram endorsement of Harris as Taylor Swift Childless Cat Lady temporarily became a campaign issue due to remarks made by Trump’s running partner, Ohio Senator JD Vance, regarding childless cat ladies.
It turned up that ladies who had cats but no dogs overwhelmingly supported Harris. Pet owners generally did not appear to take offense at Vance’s comments, and such voters were a comparatively small portion of the electorate.
Harris was more successful with female cat owners than with male cat owners.
Whether or not they had children, women who owned simply a cat were more likely to vote for Harris than people who owned both a dog and a cat. According to AP VoteCast, over 60% of women who had cats but no dogs voted for Harris. Among women who did not own either type of pet, she performed comparably well.
Her popularity among cat-owning women did not crossover to men. Men who only owned cats voted for Trump by a slim margin; just over half of them backed him.
The majority of those voters had a very or somewhat negative opinion of Vance, however it’s impossible to tell how much of that contributed to Harris’ victory with women who only had cats. Compared to women who only own dogs or women who own both dogs and cats, they were more inclined to detest. Additionally, they were more likely to have a negative opinion of Trump and the Republican Party than all female voters.
The disparity can be explained simply by the fact that, even prior to Vance’s remarks resurfacing, women who had cats were not particularly likely to vote for Trump. Only roughly 4 out of 10 female voters who only had a cat were Republicans, according to AP VoteCast.
Trump scored better with dog owners, who make up a larger portion of the electorate.
If anything, the outcome of the 2024 election indicates that Democrats might need to address the issue of dog owners. Dog owners, including those who also owned cats, were more likely to vote for Trump and accounted for a larger portion of the electorate.
Just 15% of voters were cat owners who did not also own a dog. Dog owners were a far more powerful voting bloc since, in comparison, roughly 2 out of 10 voters owned both types of pets, and roughly 3 out of 10 voters exclusively owned a dog. Trump received the support of roughly half of the female voters and roughly 6 out of 10 male voters who had a dog but no cat.
Trump’s campaign erroneously claimed that immigrants in Ohio were snatching and eating dogs and cats, even though it did not appeal to dog owners in the same way that Harris’ campaign did with cat owners. However, much like with the Vance comments, there is no proof that Trump’s remarks had an impact on pet owners’ choices in the end. The fact that almost half of women who own dogs and six out of ten males who solely own dogs identify as Republicans suggests that party allegiance was probably a significant contributing factor.
Therefore, Democrats hoping to win over dog lovers might not have an easy solution. However, it’s also true that neither Trump nor Harris have pets, therefore the presidential contenders didn’t have any canines with them during the campaign. There’s a chance that a bit more bark could help future efforts.
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NORC at the University of Chicago conducts the AP VoteCast, a survey of the American electorate, for Fox News, PBS NewsHour, The Wall Street Journal, and The Associated Press. Over 120,000 people participated in the eight-day survey, which ended when polls closed. Both Spanish and English were used during the interviews. Self-identified registered voters using NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, which is intended to be representative of the U.S. population, self-identified registered voters chosen from nonprobability online panels, and a random sample of registered voters selected from state voter files are all included in the survey. Overall, voters are expected to have a sampling error margin of plus or minus 0.4 percentage points. Learn more about the technique used by APVoteCast at https://www.ap.org/elections/our-role/ap-votecast/.
The Associated Press, 2024. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. It is prohibited to publish, broadcast, rewrite, or redistribute this content without authorization.
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