Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance likened Vice President Kamala Harris to a teenage beauty pageant contestant on Thursday. In response to Harris’ first sit-down interview with a professional journalist since becoming Democrats’ presidential nominee, Vance of a Miss Teen USA contestant struggling to answer a question in 2007. “BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview,” Vance wrote on social media, attaching a video of then-18-year-old Caitlin Upton stammering incoherently through an answer about why some Americans supposedly can’t find the U.
S. on a map. Upton, an honor student, was widely ridiculed for her answer in 2007.
In an , she said she just froze up. “Personally, my friends and I, we know exactly where the United States is on a map,” she said then. Comparing Harris, a presidential candidate, to an old clip of a teenager at a beauty pageant — an inherently gendered activity, which often carries the false that contestants are ignorant or silly — is notable.
While Upton’s fumbling response made headlines at the time, she has not been in the public eye since. In her interview with CNN on Thursday, Harris said her “values have not changed” even though she’s moved away from some of the more progressive positions she took during the Democratic primary in 2019 and 2020, such as the Green New Deal. “I have always believed, and I have worked on it, that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter,.