Why JD Vance is being dogged by couch memes — and struggling in general

• In the days since he became Trump's running mate, JD Vance's vulnerabilities have become clear.
• Until now, Vance was mostly unknown nationwide. That makes it easier for opponents to define him.
• He's also long espoused ideas that are generally unpopular with the public.

Nearly two weeks after former President Donald Trump selected Sen. JD Vance as his running mate, it's safe to say the Ohio politician is struggling.

His polling is the worst of any nonincumbent vice-presidential nominee in decades. His years-old comments about "childless cat ladies" have drawn widespread disgust. Some in Trump's orbit worry they've made the wrong choice. In recent days, he's been the target of a baseless rumor that he once had sex with a couch.

It was always clear that Vance brought little to the table, strictly electorally speaking. He does not represent a swing state, he does not diversify the ticket, and the selection of a MAGA true believer does not reassure more Trump-skeptic voters.

He was the choice of a campaign that was brimming with confidence. President Joe Biden had not yet dropped out of the race, and Trump's team likely made the choice with the idea that it did not need the boost that other vice-presidential contenders could have brought to the ticket, choosing instead to select an heir to the MAGA movement.

What was less predictable were the significant headwinds that Vance is now encountering as the GOP's vice-presidential nominee, which have been driven by the way he's talked about certain policies and enabled by the simple fact that most Americans are just now learning who he is.

Vance was unknown to many Americans before last week

In an AP-NORC poll conducted in the days before Vance was selected, 60% of Americans surveyed said they did not know enough about the Ohio senator to have an opinion about him. Twenty-two percent reported an unfavorable opinion, while just 17% said they had a favorable opinion.

That lack of familiarity is a key reason that the memes about Vance having sex with a couch have taken off.

To be clear, there's no evidence that ever happened. The meme began with a single X user joking that the Ohio senator wrote about it on pages 179 to 181 of his 2016 autobiography, "Hillbilly Elegy," which is patently and verifiably false. But then, The Associated Press decided to fact-check the claim before deleting its story, amplifying it further. By Thursday, social media was awash with memes riffing on the notion that Trump's vice-presidential nominee had once fornicated with a couch. One Democratic congressman even referenced it during a CNN interview that evening.

When voters don't know much about a candidate, stories like this initially appear plausible. Even after they're debunked, they can persist. In Vance's case, the meme seems to be an ironic stand-in for other issues that voters may have with the Ohio senator, even if they know he probably didn't have sex with a couch.

His 'cat ladies' comment is alienating — and there's probably more where that came from

A lesser-known candidate is also an easier target for their political opponents, especially if they come armed with all the most controversial things that the candidate has said.

In a way, Vance is running into the same problem that Blake Masters — a former Senate candidate who's ideologically aligned with the Ohio senator — encountered in his 2022 race in Arizona: People are being alienated by what he has to say.

This week, it's his comments about childless people. Next week, it could be something else: Trump's VP pick has an extensive online footprint.

In this instance, Vance is taking aim at childlessness because he subscribes to a more idiosyncratic, nationalist vision of conservatism than most other GOP politicians, and he's interested in ways to encourage the growth of families.

He has suggested incentivizing that growth by allocating additional votes to parents based on the number of kids they have, or by taxing childless adults at a higher rate than parents — a policy that's somewhat similar to a child tax credit.

But those ideas, and that framing, are somewhat alien to the broader public. Then, you throw in the disparaging way that he talked about certain Democratic politicians — including Vice President Kamala Harris — as "childless cat ladies" in a 2021 interview with the then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Vance made that comment shortly after he launched his Senate campaign, in which he was working to distinguish himself in a crowded field of Republicans. In short, his audience wasn't the general public but GOP primary voters.

Yet that sort of flippant comment makes an already-unknown candidate really easy to define in the context of a national campaign.

During an interview on Megyn Kelly's radio show on Friday, Vance insisted that he was referring solely to those politicians, not to Americans who are unable to have kids. But the damage had already been done.

"Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I've got nothing against cats. I've got nothing against dogs," Vance said. "People are focusing so much on the sarcasm, and not on the substance of what I actually said. And the substance of what I said Megyn, I'm sorry, it's true."