We all know that there has long been a valorization of the conventional nuclear family in Republican thinking, and this year is no exception. Look to vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s stance on “childless cat ladies.” (Spoiler: he doesn’t like them!) Or, there’s the thread of conservative thinking that would give parents more voting power than non-parents (an idea Vance once endorsed). I do my best not to be too dialed in to what Republican-aligned extremists think of Ella Emhoff’s tattoos (take it from this heavily tatted Jewish daughter: If your parents can get over the body art, the rest of the world will too), but hearing a right-wing commentator charmingly opine that “this is pretty much the nightmare scenario for most people with a daughter” feels like a sign that the GOP has a very, very limited idea of what a family should look like.
Meanwhile, onstage (and off) at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, there’s quite a different vision of family playing out—and it’s one that looks a lot more like what the rest of the country looks like. A 2023 Pew Research Center report notes that interracial and interethnic marriages, LGBTQ+ marriages, and later-in-life marriages are all becoming more common, with more and more women choosing not to have children, having fewer children or having children without being married. In Chicago this wee we saw members of Kamala Harris’s blended, extended family—including her stepkids Ella and Cole, her niece and her two young daughters, and her husband Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin, with whom Harris is said to have a close relationship. (A joke circulated on X that Kerstin is more supportive of her ex-husband than Melania Trump is of her current husband.) Even Tim Walz, with his forthright acknowledgment that his daughter Hope had only been born because of IVF, offered a slightly different angle on the “conventional family.” All of this offered complex, diverse, and happy-seeming family tableau. It might not look like what J.D. Vance would consider “family,” but it does mirror a growing shift in American demographics.
This is undoubtedly cause for concern for the increasingly Evangelical-influenced religious right, but to many in the U.S. it probably looks just right: About 16 percent of children are growing up in blended families, according to the US Census Bureau. We’ve spent long enough elevating the white, cis, straight, mom, dad and two-point-five-kids vision of family. Maybe it’s time for the rest of us to see ourselves in political circles. I like to think I’m a realist about what scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor called “the limits of representation,” but I still can’t help but feel a glimmer of hope that the DNC has provided an expanded notion about what a family can look like.
Maybe the best thing Democrats can do right now—and throughout the rest of the 2024 presidential campaign—is embrace their difference from the GOP and model family structures that actually look familiar to a growing majority of American who like their families just the way they are.
