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Notes -
I notice these are all men. Do you have any childless female politicians whose achievements render Vance's judgement inaccurate?
Non-parents who believe in climate change could believe not what the science actually says, but what they are told by joirnalists: that within their lifetimes a mass extinction of humans is possible. If they believe such a thing, then they think they have "skin in the game".
As a source they were asked about the "perceived threat" and found no difference, so while that's still a plausible claim of yours, note that the average is only just under 6 (1-10 "not a threat" to "extreme threat"), so I don't find that argument about doomsday media very convincing. Clearly most people only consider it a medium threat of some sort.
So ChatGPT cites Bush-era Secretary of State/NSA Condoleezza Rice, three-decade Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski, one term Illinois Black senator Carol Moseley Braun, and two-decade Maine senator Olympia Snowe. Interestingly, ChatGPT decided to add a little thing to the end saying leadership isn't impacted by having kids without prompting. Though I probably disagree with the politics of at least some, on both sides of the aisle, I think at least two of those were relatively prominent?
Still, this doesn't quite answer our original question, which was more about the administrative machinery, often alleged to be non-elected. I have no idea if good statistics exist for the federal workforce more broadly, though probably not. Maybe a good proxy would be to go more local? And anyways childless women in politics aren't like crazy common, at least none come to mind right away, but part of that is we haven't had decent representation of women in Congress for very long either. Still if anything childless women (in electoral politics) seem to be very under-represented? Back of envelope math puts the proportion of childless women as about a quarter of adult women, though that likely goes down if you cut off the age a little higher (like most politicians). However, if you look at most female politicians, the vast majority seem to have kids. So yeah, back to local politics I guess.
I used this wiki page of notable women legislators in my home state of Oregon (which I thought might represent a liberal and childless state) and asked GPT to look up how many did or did not have kids. In my random sample of 15 people from that list, 3 did not, 2 were unclear, and 7 did. That doesn't seem too out of line with the general population. And the ones I read about (there were a few obituaries) seemed to have been impactful even when they didn't have kids.
So I really don't see the pattern Vance is talking about. I think he's talking out of his ass.
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