A Young Voter Asked JD Vance A Question About Family And Affordability — And You Wont Believe His Answer

Days before the midterm elections, JD Vance made a joke about Ohio Sen. Jon Husted’s (R-Ohio) backside while answering a college student’s question at a Fox News town hall in Fort Worth, Texas.

On Thursday night, Kate White, a senior at Texas Christian University and vice president of the school’s Turning Point USA chapter, told the vice president her generation feels pressure to get married young and have as many kids as possible despite housing prices.

“What the right doesn’t acknowledge most of the time is how disincentivized we are currently because of the cost of owning a home and the general expenses of raising a family,” White said. “And so, my question is: How does the right and yourself expect us to start families young when the average price of a home in America now costs more than $415,000, which just feels out of reach for us?”

After thanking White for her question and support, Vance replied, “I’ve only been asked one question about [Ohio Sen.] Jon Husted’s ass.”

The line drew some laughter from the audience and host Jesse Watters, whom Vance had told he felt “jealous” of President Donald Trump’s repeated praise of Husted’s physique.

When Vance finally returned to White’s question, he told her “the reason why housing exploded in the United States of America is in part because we allowed 20 million illegal aliens into our country.”

Vance has made this argument before. In September 2025, he told Fox News it was actually “30 million illegal immigrants” who took away American homes, but did not explain how people he has called “low-wage servants” were able to do this. PolitiFact found that Vance’s claim does not hold up generally and that there are far fewer immigrants illegally in the U.S. than he claimed.

In response to White, Vance did concede, “We don’t pay enough attention to the affordability problems that are affecting young people. Most Republicans don’t. I think I’m an exception.”

Vance’s answer to White’s question didn’t go over well online. Crooked Media host Jon Favreau, a former Obama speechwriter, shared the video and asked, “How is this real and how is he this bad at politics? Or humor? Or interacting with other humans?”

Sarah Matthews, who served as deputy press secretary during Trump’s first term, wrote on X, “I genuinely cannot believe this is a real exchange between a voter and the Vice President of the United States.”

“If Vance is the candidate in 2028, he will be eminently beatable,” journalist Mehdi Hasan posted. “He is an awful politician.”

Katherine Jellison, a history professor emerita at Ohio University, told HuffPost that Vance has always had a somewhat awkward, unique communication style, but that the joke about Husted was “a very unusual choice to make,” even for him.

“He risks turning off some young voters with that kind of response,” she said, adding that it might make people “think twice” about whether he’s “ready for primetime in 2028.”

Michael Phillips-Anderson, an associate professor of communication at Monmouth University, studies how politicians can successfully inject humor into political rhetoric.

His research has focused on the strategy of using humor to “deflect from an issue that the speaker just doesn’t want to talk about,” he said.

Phillips-Anderson cited President Ronald Reagan’s successful use of humor at the 1984 presidential debate when asked if, at age 73, he was too old for the job compared to his 56-year-old opponent.

“I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” Reagan said. “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

But the problem with Vance’s situation, Phillips-Anderson argued, is that “the joke is seemingly a total non-sequitur.”

“He’s not even [making] the joke; he’s just referencing it,” he said. “Not in a way that seems particularly clever or revelatory or helps Trump or helps him.”

Phillips-Anderson also speculated that Vance may have tried to use the joke to buy time while pondering how to respond to White.

“Using a non-humorous, emotional story about his background, I think, would be a better way to [secure his audience] while still buying time,” Phillips-Anderson said. “He had personal experience of housing instability throughout his childhood — that would have been a way to engender the goodwill of the audience while also deflecting from an issue that he and the Republicans largely don’t want to talk about.”

Tom Hollihan, a communications professor at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, said White wasn’t asking a “gotcha” question but raising a serious concern many young voters share. “It’s really a signal of the challenge that this administration faces in this midterm election,” Hollihan told HuffPost.

“To be a conservative activist on many college campuses is a challenging thing,” he said. “So when she asks a very serious question, and he is so dismissive of her … I think it makes her situation more challenging in her own student community.”

White did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment. But the concern she raised reflects broader youth voter polling results. A recent Harvard Youth Poll that was conducted between Sept. 30 and Oct. 7 found that nearly half of young Americans are concerned about their personal finances, with 27% expecting to be worse off financially than their parents — a first in the poll’s history.

Youth voting intention is also lower compared to 2018 and 2022, with the largest decline happening for young Republican voters, the poll reported.

The vice president’s office did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.