In the 2024 election, Kamala Harris won among voters who owned only cats, by a 54-45% margin, but Donald Trump won among those who owned only dogs, by a 55-44% margin, and among those who owned both, by a 53-46% margin. Harris also won among voters who owned neither, by a 52-46% margin (women with neither type of pet voted for Harris by a 58-41% margin, while men with neither type of pet voted for Trump by a much smaller 51-46% margin).
The Associated Press describes the results of a survey of more than 120,000 voters:
Two-thirds of voters said they own a dog or cat, but pet owners don’t usually get much attention from politicians. Until this year, when then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s old comments about “childless cat ladies” briefly became a campaign issue — and Taylor Swift signed her Instagram endorsement of Harris in September as “Taylor Swift Childless Cat Lady.” Harris did end up decisively winning women who owned a cat but no dog, but those voters were a relatively small slice of the electorate. And pet owners as a whole did not seem to hold Vance’s remarks against the GOP ticket….
It’s impossible to know how much Vance’s comments played into Harris’ success with women who only had cats, but most of those voters had a “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable opinion of Vance. They were more likely than women who only own dogs or women who have cats and dogs to dislike Vance. They were also more likely than female voters overall to have a negative view of Trump and the Republican Party.
A simple explanation for the divide is that women who were cat owners were never very inclined to vote for Trump, even before Vance’s comments….only about 4 in 10 female voters who only owned a cat were Republicans….
Voters who owned a dog — including voters who owned a cat as well — were more likely to support Trump, and they made up a bigger share of the electorate. Cat owners who didn’t also have a dog made up only about 15% of voters. About 2 in 10 voters, by contrast, owned both kinds of pets, and about 3 in 10 only had a dog, which meant that dog owners were a much more influential voting bloc. Trump won about 6 in 10 men voters who owned a dog but no cat, and about half of female voters in this group.
