Democrats have for weeks been pushing their narrative that JD Vance is ‘weird’ around women.
Now DailyMail.com has unearthed a decades-old picture that isn’t going to help the GOP vice-presidential candidate dispel that characterization.
It was taken in jest – and has a real meaning behind it – but, still, it is not a good look considering the other claims leveled at Donald Trump’s pick for his Number Two.
In the photograph, Vance, then 18, is seen in a men’s bathroom looking on as three girls pretend to use the urinals.
The picture appeared in the 2003 yearbook of Middletown High School in Ohio when Vance – then known as JD Hamel – was in his senior year.
No explanation was given in the yearbook itself as to why the three girls were in the bathroom, nor why they should be pictured with Vance.
But now, one of the three has explained to DailyMail.com the meaning behind the surprising shot.
It was to show the power of girls in that year’s student government, one of the women who asked that her name not be used, said.
‘We thought it would be funny,’ she added.
‘Usually it was all male officers, and we were an even split, and so it was sort of the opposite.’
The picture showed the four top student council officers – president, vice-president, secretary and treasurer.
Ironically Vance was vice-president, the position he is now seeking in federal government.
But while the picture was meant as a lighthearted take on school life it can’t help but add to the perception that Vance, now 40, will have to shake.
The first-term US senator from Ohio, has been constantly criticized since Donald Trump picked him as his running mate on July 15.
Democrats have gleefully latched on to old comments of his that bolster the idea that he does not know how to deal with women.
One of the most notorious was when he said that the country is ‘effectively run by a bunch of childless cat ladies’ singling out Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg who are ‘miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too’.
‘The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,’ he claimed, failing to note that Harris and Buttigieg both have adopted children and AOC, at 34, is still of child-bearing age.
Eight-times Oscar-nominated actress Glenn Close – who played Vance’s grandmother in the film version of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy – posted a photo on Instagram of her holding her cat Eve.
‘Eve would have left a bleeding mouse head in the bed of anyone who criticized any kind of lady with a cat!’ wrote the mother-of-one.
Critics have also noted that Vance has supported the state monitoring women’s pregnancies.
‘He’s consistently shamed families and mothers who prioritize their career and choose to wait to start a family,’ said one.
‘Vance has made off-putting remarks about his ‘effect on women’, and he has a history of passing judgment on and making insulting assumptions about women in his life,’ the source added.
Democrats point to the time he was asked, aged 14, to pick a political issue he cared about and he chose abortion.
He still calls himself ‘100 percent pro-life’ and has called for a federal limit on abortion, saying of cases where women want to terminate their pregnancy in cases of rape of incest ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’.
It was his opponent for vice president, Democrat Minnesota Governor Tim Walz who first coined the word ‘weird’ for Trump and Vance.
He said the pair were ‘creepy’ and ‘weird as hell’.
In an earlier interview he said: ‘These guys are just weird. They’re running for he-man women-haters’ club or something. That’s what they go at. That’s not what people are interested in.’
The comments have since sparked a vicious campaign by critics and Internet sleuths ridiculing and digging up dirt on Vance, including one viral photo allegedly of Vance dressed as a woman and sporting a blonde wig.
That picture is said to date from his time at Yale Law School.
Vance has hit back at the criticism, telling CNN’s Dana Bash that the insults are ‘fundamentally school yard bully stuff’.
‘They’re name-calling instead of actually telling the American people how they’re going to make their lives better,’ he said.
‘I think that’s weird, Dana, but look, they can call me whatever they want to.’
He then said the Democrats’ use of ‘weird’ was less about him and Trump, and more about his opponents not being ‘comfortable in their own skin, because they’re uncomfortable with their policy positions for the American people’.
But Democrats say there are so many examples of Vance being uncomfortable when discussing women’s issues the charge of weirdness is apt.
They cite his tendency to criticize women for working instead of raising a family as one example.
‘If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had,’ he said in 2022.
And the Harris camp has even claimed he advocated that women should stay in unhappy, or even violent, marriages for the sake of their children, when he said in 2022 that the sexual revolution had made it easier for people to ‘shift spouses like they change their underwear’.
Vance has adamantly denied that that is what he meant.
A column in his home-state Ohio Capital Journal added Vance’s ‘stalking’ of Vice President Kamala Harris at the Eau Clair Airport in Wisconsin – when he walked over to her plane in an attempt to get her to answer questions – as another example of his ‘contempt’ for women.
‘It was the kind of juvenile stunt you’d expect from a frat boy being a jerk,’ wrote Marilou Johanek, who labeled Vance ‘Senator Cringeworthy’.
‘The Republican vice-presidential nominee is seemingly hellbent on reinforcing his odious public image as a weird piece of work from The Handmaid’s Tale,’ she added.