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WEDDED SPLIT
GOP exploits the marriage gap
BY ADAM REILLY
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Think George W. Bush’s push to encourage marriage is just about strengthening families? Think again. As a study released this week by Women’s Voices, Women Vote (a project devoted to increasing electoral participation among unmarried women) demonstrates, Bush and his fellow conservatives have good reason to engineer as many marriages as they possibly can. The WVWV study, which was funded by the Cambridge-based Barbara Lee Family Foundation, contains some striking findings about the 2004 presidential election. Unmarried women were among the strongest Democratic constituencies; 62 percent voted for John Kerry, while only 37 percent voted for Bush. Married women, in contrast, were a solidly pro-Bush bloc, with 55 percent voting Republican and 44 percent Democrat. Across the gender line, a huge gap also separated married men from their unmarried counterparts. For example, white married men voted overwhelmingly for Bush, 66 percent to 33 percent. But among white unmarried men, the gap — 53 to 46 percent in favor of Bush — was much smaller. "There’s a marriage gap in this country in terms of how people vote," concludes WVWV founder Page Gardner. "It’s a defining dynamic in today’s politics. Marital status is a significant predictor of voting, and gender is not. Basically, the key factors are party, race, marital status, and education." The good news, if you’re a Democrat, is that unmarried women voted last year in unprecedented numbers, increasing their share of the national vote from 19 to 22 percent. If this trend continues in ’08, it could hurt the GOP’s efforts to retain the White House. The bad news is that Bush seems willing to do everything he can to diminish unmarried voters’ numbers, from spending hundreds of millions of dollars on federal pro-marriage programs, to putting ostensibly neutral commentators like Maggie Gallagher on the payroll — and he’s got four more years to press his agenda. All of which is worth remembering the next time the president waxes ecstatic about the socially redemptive value of marriage. Of course, the act of getting married may not turn Democrats into Republicans — maybe, for assorted sociological reasons, Republicans are more likely to be married. But it seems to be a good start.
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