Single Women Are the Odd Men Out, PoliticallyMichael Barone
Aug 18, 2023
America's political parties are the oldest and third-oldest in the world, and they have competed for votes among a population that has been diverse since colonial times. If you have any doubts about that, consult David Hackett Fischer's 1989 classic "Albion's Seed" on how settlers from different parts of the British Isles brought distinctive "folkways" to the different seaboard colonies and the Appalachian backwoods.
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Regional differences have long been obvious: Differences between North and South produced the Civil War. But in recent elections, the Midwest has voted more like the South than like the Northeast or the West.
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By the 1990s, evangelical Protestants emerged as a heavily Republican group, and in the 2010s, white college graduates (especially those with post-graduate degrees) as a heavily Democratic group.
And then there is the gender gap, the difference between male and female voters, which became statistically significant in 1980. In the years since, and despite the quip attributed to Henry Kissinger that "there's too much fraternizing with the enemy," it has grown wider.
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Married women, however, also voted Republican by a landslide 56% to 42% margin. So, why was the election so close? Because unmarried women favored Democrats 68% to 31%.
Note that married men and married women both made up 30% of the electorate. But there are a lot more unmarried women voters, 23% of the electorate, than unmarried men, 16%.
That reflects not only longer female lifespans but also female dominance in higher education, with women making up 60% of college and university students these days, and the trend toward later first marriages.
The upshot is that about one-third of Democratic voters are single women, which helps explain, as the Washington Examiner's Conn Carroll points out, the 2012 Obama "Life of Julia" cartoons, which showed government helping unattached women through life.
In general, women are more risk-averse than men, and thus more supportive of welfare state measures and more reluctant to support military action. They are also, as we have seen on female-dominated campuses, more willing to suppress speech that is seen as irritating or hurtful. "Highly educated women," as Australian educator Lorenzo Warby writes, "are proving all too willing to trash other people's freedoms to protect their emotions."
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Source:
https://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbarone/2023/08/18/single-women-are-the-odd-men-out-politically-n2627188