JD Vance just made things a lot easier for Kamala Harris - By Emily Maitlis

It is one hundred days until the US presidential election. One. Hundred. Days. If the next hundred is anything like the last 30, we will actually have entered - emotionally - a new geologic time unit, a leap from Paleogenic to Cretaceous passing through the near extinction-level events as Donald Trump’s attempted assassination and Biden’s exit from the next presidential race.

Today, Barack Obama became the latest, the last, the biggest, Democrat to endorse “my friend Kamala” for President on a carefully choreographed phone call. Her position as the Democratic nominee is - as his 2008 campaign song might have put it -signed, sealed and delivered.

In the frenzy of the last five days -yes, it genuinely is only five days since that statement from Joe Biden dropped - Kamala has been crowned, raised hundreds of millions of dollars (the first 81 million within 12 hours), spawned a new TikTok presence shared by Gen Z women, and put something that feels very much like joy back into what was at best a lacklustre democratic strategy.

The big question for the next hundred days is: “How does she campaign? Where does she lean into Joe Biden and his achievements, where does she pull away?”

Much has been made of her prosecutorial status. Make no mistake, it’s a big card to play. She’s a hot shot attorney, who as her first campaign address made clear, has spent a lifetime dealing with sex offenders, fraudsters, and cheats. She has no fear of them. Cue the roar of the crowd as they realise she’s talking about convicted felon Donald Trump.

But the even bigger card she brings is her clear-sightedness on the abortion issue. This was always a complicated one for Biden. As a Catholic and a god-fearing man, he walked a political line that said he would do everything to protect women’s choice. And a personal line that told us he wasn’t really a big fan.

He straddled that one well enough to help his party win time and again on the issue - in the midterms, in the Governor races, the referendums on this issue. But he could never be full throated on it in the way Kamala Harris can.

When Arizona threatened to return the state to an arcane hardline abortion law from 1864 (before women had the vote or Arizona was a state), all it took was the threat of Kamala Harris appearing in the state for legislators to change their position.

They rowed back from a statute that made abortion illegal from conception to allow it within 15 weeks. This is a position that in today’s post Roe v Wade world feels pretty moderate.

Make no mistake, Arizona is a tight, tight race. A swing state. Republican legislators realised how unpopular they would make their party with women if they take away the freedom’s they've had for fifty years.

And this brings us neatly onto Trump’s VP Pick - J.D. Vance. It is hard, I think, for Democrats to imagine a more perfect incarnation as running mate than the senator from Ohio that has found himself on Trump’s ticket.

His own hardline stance on abortion mirrors that of Trump - which essentially mirrors the Supreme Court. There isn’t a cigarette paper between what they say publicly.

But there is a such arrogance, such misogyny in the language Vance has used about women it’s allowing Democrats to have an absolute field day.

Within hours of Harris putting her name forward for the nomination, an interview resurfaced from several years ago - his Senate campaign - where he began to describe ‘childless’ Democrats.

He plucked Harris and Pete Buttigieg, who is gay, as two examples of legislators with - as he suggested - no vested interests in the future of America because they haven’t spawned offspring.

Let’s put aside for a moment the inconvenient correction that he’s factually wrong. Buttigieg is both married and a father. Harris is a stepmother. Let’s also put aside the very notion that giving birth is something every US president has done. No US president has ever done it.

As I say, these correctives are at the very margins of what the argument is about. Vance has set himself up on a collision course with millions of American women who either don’t want or can’t have children by referring to them as “childless cat ladies”.

It’s not just that it’s insulting. Or sexist. Or hurtful. It’s that it is so, so deeply politically stupid when you know that your party keeps losing women voters because it treats them like they don’t matter.

It is a gift to Democrats and they can’t believe how lucky they are. There are more Vance videos. More opinions that are both vile and frankly delicious to the Harris campaign right now. He becomes the first modern VP to call no fault divorce ‘one of the great tricks that the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace’.

He’s gone on record to say that women in violent or abusive marriages shouldn’t "shift spouses like they change their underwear" and the women leaving those marriages had damaged a generation of children.

It is almost impossible to comprehend how a man who grew up in such emotionally harrowing circumstances- a heroin addict mother and severe economic depression - can reduce such complicated human matters to such trite metaphors.

But the Dems? They’re all in for Vance, the comedy chauvinist villain who’s made their own campaign slogan so much simpler.

It doesn't have to be about the specifics of abortion terms in weeks, or the availability of Mifepristone medication. They just have to pose it as a question: Do you think this Republican ticket likes women? And the women of America may finally be about to tell them.