JD Vance isn’t backing down from his past criticism of prominent elected Democrats as “childless cat ladies.”

In an interview on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Show, Kelly talked to Vance in depth about scornful comments he made in 2021 about people who choose not to procreate. At one point, she asked him to respond to the outrage over his use of the term “cat ladies.”

“Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats. I’ve got nothing against dogs, and I’ve got one dog at home, and I love him,” Vance said.

“People are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I said, and the substance of what I said, Megyn, I’m sorry, it’s true,” Vance said.

In his interview with Kelly on Friday, Vance acknowledged that Vice President Kamala Harris has stepchildren and that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has adopted children. He had named them both as childless cat ladies in 2021.

“I wish her stepchildren, and Kamala Harris, and her whole family, the very best,” Vance said. “The point is not that she’s lesser. The point is that her a party has pursued of set of policies that are profoundly anti-child.”

But Vance did not take back his 2021 statements that people without children “don’t have a direct stake” in the country’s future. He didn’t recant his claim that people who’ve chosen not to have children are “miserable.”

The Ohio Republican senator and vice presidential candidate went on to explain that Democrats are “anti-family” because, in part, of liberal commentary about the downsides of having children. (Some young people say, for instance, that they don’t have want to have children because of climate change.)

Vance also pointed, repeatedly, to two anti-family policy positions that he claimed Democrats have taken: “Why are they wanting to mask toddlers years into the pandemic? Why are they saying that we should get rid of the child tax credit, which lowers taxes for working families with children?”

The child tax credit reduces household tax bills by as much as $2,000 (£1,555) per child, a policy with bipartisan support; Democrats temporarily expanded the credit to as much as $3,600 (£2,800) per child in 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan. They wanted to make the expansion permanent but failed to do so in large part because of unanimous opposition from Republicans, including Vance.

Vance also falsely claimed to Kelly Democrats actually don’t support the CTC, as it’s known. An ABC News story published Friday drew attention to a comment Vance once made arguing parents should pay lower taxes than non-parents. In that story, a spokesman for Vance pointed out that the CTC already does give parents a lower tax rate, which he acknowledged Democrats do support.

As for the idea of a childhood mask mandate, Vance seemed to be referring to past Democratic support for masking in places like schools and daycares.

The campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, highlighted Vance’s interview with Kelly on Friday, and in an email about his support for an abortion ban, called him a “creep” and “weird.”