To the Democratic Party and the future political prospects of Vice President Kamala Harris, there is no constituency more important than single women.
When it comes to relationship status, no factor is more of a predictor that a woman will vote for the Democratic Party than that she is single. On the flip side, no factor is more of a predictor for a woman voting for the Republican Party than that she is married.
According to data from the Pew Research Center, 50% of married women are registered Republicans, while 45% are registered Democrats. But 72% of never-married women are registered Democrats, while a meager 24% are registered Republicans.
By contrast, the partisan split among men is much less pronounced, with 59% of married men as registered Republicans, as well as 37% of never-married men. As Election Day rushes closer, there is more and more evidence that even young single men are turning toward former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party at an ever-accelerating rate.
These glaring differences in voting behavior based on marital status, as well as a growing education divide in the electorate, have laid the groundwork for the most pronounced gender gap among voters in the history of presidential elections. By any reasonable assessment, a decisive majority of male voters will support the return of Trump to the White House, while a decisive majority of female voters will support Harris and the Democratic ticket.
The slow-burning death of marriage
The reasons for this political divide between the sexes can be boiled down to one primary factor: the steep decline of marriage among the populace, which has coincided with a precipitous drop in the nation’s fertility rate. To understand why this decline happened, we have to review how cultures and peoples across time and around the world have treated and practiced the institution of marriage.
In his new book, Sex and the Citizen, Washington Examiner Commentary Editor Conn Carroll has created an impressive overview of the history of marriage that helps explain the diverging political identities of men and women while providing a fascinating historical insight into the evolution of marriage as an institution. He also explores how the modern sexual revolution sells a culture of consequence-free sexual adventure while attempting to ignore the unavoidable fact that what happens in the bedroom does not stay in the bedroom.
Today, the influence of the 20th century’s sexual revolution can be seen everywhere, from the public promotion of the hookup culture and easy access of pornography to broken homes and unstable relationships that come from discarding marriage as a foundation of stable societies. In public policy, this influence can be seen most glaringly in the fact that the Democratic Party has abandoned the position it held in the 1990s that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. Instead, it now relies on it as a supposed issue of women’s healthcare and freedom as its primary motivator to get voters to the polls. The party runs a political operation that loudly declares that abortion should be so commonplace and normal, such an established right, that taxpayers must be forced to foot the bill.
Childless cat ladies
The primary audience for the campaign message promoting contraception and abortion is the now vast corps of single women. This was a fact made abundantly clear to the Republican Party in 2022, when the GOP underperformed expectations and only managed to scrape together a minuscule majority in the House of Representatives while losing a seat in the Senate. This election outcome came on the heels of the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade and a constitutional right to abortion, which energized the Democratic voter base and turned what was widely expected to be a “red wave” into a trickle.
There is a convincing argument to be made that had there been no decline in marriage, and had the political identities of the sexes not diverged so significantly, the Democrats’ use of abortion and contraception access to motivate their voters and get them to the polls would have been greatly diminished.
In his book, Carroll tracks the decline of the family over the past 50 years with compelling detail, explaining how the federal government’s eagerness to establish a welfare state inadvertently created the conditions in which having children outside wedlock became a better financial decision than having children within a marriage. This new welfare regime married women not to men but to the state and one-upped any financial benefit that getting married may have provided.
At the same time as women embraced their welfare husband, the federal government, political movements were afoot that sold men and women on the notion that sex can and should be free of commitment and consequence and that career advancement is more important and more fulfilling than building a family life. As this cultural view began to take hold, the “childless cat lady” was born, as Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), the Republican vice presidential nominee, bluntly put it in a 2021 interview.
To this demographic group of women, marriage has become an afterthought, but sexual pleasure is still necessary. In order to enjoy a life of sexual libertinism, contraception and abortion must be readily available. In this arrangement, the possibility of having a child becomes an albatross hung around a woman’s neck. Such a political position requires a failsafe method of removing such a burden at all costs, lest it interfere with a woman’s sexual freedom. On the flip side, however, contraception and abortion equally help men to have sexual encounters with any woman without making any serious commitment and without fathering a child for whom they would be financially liable.
Sex, marriage, and the church
If there is one thing that is missing from Carroll’s overview of the decline of the institution of marriage, it is this: an account of the role that dwindling religiosity has played in the decline of marriage, which has historically been as much a religious institution as it has been a cultural one.
Carroll brilliantly explains the role that Christianity played in creating the social standards around marriage that prevailed in the West from the fall of the Roman Empire until the 1960s, which, for the first time in human history, prohibited any form of polygamy, including the taking of concubines. These standards of moral behavior, rooted in the Christian tradition, became the basis for most laws governing sexual morality. From the prohibitions on adultery to the lack of legal status for children conceived in illegitimate relationships, Christian morality governed much of the West for centuries, recognizing that the legal constraints on sexual relationships helped ensure the prosperity of the civilization and of its people.
But as the sexual revolution took hold in the 1960s, it found a receptive audience in large part because the institution of the church was itself changing profoundly. Fear of eternal punishment has long been a powerful motivator in controlling public morality. But as the sexual revolution expanded, pastors no longer demanded high moral standards from their congregations in accordance with their respective religious traditions but rather justified and endorsed changing secular morals from the pulpit, to the point where sexual behaviors the church once considered immoral are now openly celebrated among religious denominations. While the decline of marriage cannot be simply blamed on the decline of religious observance and the wokeification of the church, there is no question that it played a part.
The “childless cat ladies,” or the “single woke females” as Carroll describes them in his book, are generally opposed to organized religion, but some still embrace it, in no small part because these institutions embraced and promoted the sexual revolution and allied feminist ideals that they regard as articles of faith. This social revolution lies beneath another emerging gender divide that is seeing more young men embrace conservative religions, even as women become increasingly secular.
A generational project
Reversing decades of social engineering and policymaking that created conditions for the decline of marriage will take generations, in the same way that it took generations for the stable monogamy of Christian Europe to become the norm across all of Western civilization.
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At the end of his book, Carroll delineates a number of policy prescriptions that have helped and could help reverse the decline of marriage and family formation. Evidence is strong that nations such as Hungary have been able slowly to reverse their declining marriage rates and, subsequently, their birth rates by embracing a policy agenda that explicitly encourages young people to get married and have children. It is a principle as old as civilization, that law is a teacher of morality.
But several generations of Americans have grown up in a nation in which the law teaches them not to get married and not to have children. The gender gap that will be the story after the presidential election of Nov. 5 regardless of who wins is the natural consequence of a nation that has been taught that marriage is to be avoided. More than anything, it is the election of the “single woke female.”