Pawsed

In an attempt to wring a bit more mileage out of Vice-President-Elect Vance's comments about "childless cat ladies," Axios decided to display some charts showing vote share for Donald Trump and Vice-President based on what pets were in the household. The data came from AP VoteCast, which surveys "more than 120,000 voters." Or, to be more precise:

The survey combines a random sample of registered voters drawn from state voter files; self-identified registered voters using NORC’s probability based AmeriSpeak panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population; and self-identified registered voters selected from nonprobability online panels.

There are, of course, other questions on the survey other than "who do you plan to/did you vote for," and "what sort of pet(s) do you own." I'm curious as to what the entire suite of questions entails, because I'm pretty sure that there's more interesting (not to mention useful) data in there than the fact that, among the people surveyed, women with no pets or who owned only cats were more likely to say they support or voted for Vice-President Harris, while all the other groups examined leaned more towards Donald Trump.

The Associated Press did attempt to insert some political commentary into the mix, noting that it didn't appear that either J. D. Vance's "cat ladies" comments or Donald Trump's assertions that Haitians in Ohio were stealing and eating people's pets made any difference to people's support. But their conclusion, that party loyalty was likely the driving factor, seemed to go without saying for anyone who has been paying attention to American politics for the past several years.

The shifting sets of voters who are attracted to the two major political parties, and changes in voter turnout seem to be the big factors in who wins and who loses. Which comes across as obvious, but that's the sort of information that's useful to know, and sometimes seems to be the hardest to find. Presumably, I would venture, because it doesn't draw as much attention as the breakdowns among pet owners.