[Peace-discuss] marital status and voting

[Ricky Baldwin]

Weird poll in my book.  Interesting results, though,
in terms of the economics. - Ricky

Married? Single? Status affects how women vote

27 Aug 04

By Susan Page, USA TODAY
 
Want to know which candidate a woman is likely to
support for president?

Look at her ring finger.

It may sound like the start of a bad joke, but the
fact is most married women say they'll vote for
President Bush (news - web sites). By nearly 2-to-1,
unmarried women say they support John Kerry.
 
The "marriage gap" - the difference in the vote
between married and unmarried women - is an
astonishing 38 percentage points, according to
aggregated USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Polls. In contrast,
the famous "gender gap," the difference in the vote
between men and women, is just 11 points.
Ginny Savopoulos thinks she understands why the
marriage gap exists.

"I registered Republican when I got married," she says
as she walks through Rodney Square in the center of
town here. That reflected her husband's political bent
and her own sense of economic security. "After I was
divorced, I was thinking more about, 'What's out there
for me as a single woman?' "

During Bush's tenure, she struggled to find comparable
work as a paralegal after she was laid off in 2002,
and she's been dismayed by the costs of the Iraq war.
She is still registered as a Republican, but she plans
to vote for Kerry. 

Analysts say the marriage gap is grounded in the
different daily lives and cultural outlooks that many
married and unmarried women have. Eighty-four years
after women won the right to vote - the 19th Amendment
took effect on this day in 1920 - that electoral
divide is shaping important battlegrounds :

• Republicans are targeting married women who work
outside the home. They reliably vote but sometimes
support Democrats, sometimes Republicans. Bush
strategist Matthew Dowd calls them a key "persuadable
group." Married women who don't work outside the home
are solidly Republican - a "turnout group."

The president's support for more "flex-time"
arrangements is designed to appeal to married women in
the workplace, who often feel less pressure for extra
pay than they do for extra time with their families.
Laura Bush's speech at the Republican National
Convention next Tuesday anchors an evening schedule
aimed at female voters. 

And the campaign last month launched a "W Stands for
Women" Web site that pitches George W. Bush on issues
such as education; 50,000 supporters have signed up.

• Democrats for the first time are making a concerted
effort to persuade single women, most of whom work, to
register and go to the polls. The overwhelming
majority of never-married, divorced and widowed women
already support Kerry, but they have been one of the
demographic groups least likely to vote. In 2000, 22
million unmarried women who were eligible to vote
didn't do so. 

Kerry's pledge to protect jobs and expand health care
coverage strikes a chord with many single women. The
Democratic National Committee announces a program
today called "Take Five" that asks loyalists to
persuade five unmarried women who aren't regular
voters to go to the polls. A non-partisan group called
1,000 Flowers is organizing voter-registration appeals
to single women at beauty salons in eight battleground
states.

"You can make some difference in turnout among single
women - 1%, 2%, 5%," says Mark Mellman, a pollster and
adviser for Kerry. "That may not seem like much, but
in a close election it could make all the difference
in the world."

Two views of the world 

Why do married and unmarried women tend to see the
political world so differently? 

For one thing, conservative women are more likely to
be married, though of course many liberal women are
married, too. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake says
unmarried women as a group start out as more
liberal-leaning than married women. And they are often
hard-pressed economically. 
	 
Most unmarried women - 54% - have annual household
incomes below $30,000, according to the Census; that's
twice the percentage of married women with incomes
that low. Most married women - 51% - have household
incomes of $50,000 and above; that's double the number
of single women with income that high.

That makes single women more anxious than their
married friends about bread-and-butter issues, less
confident of having health coverage and more likely to
take an expansive view of what the government can and
should do to maintain safety-net programs. 

Having children seems to intensify views on both
sides. Married women with children are even more
Republican that those who don't have children; single
women who have children are even more Democratic than
those who don't.

"Money-wise, it's very hard, especially as a single
parent," says Evelyn Ocasio, 34, a widow who supports
four children with her job as a receptionist. She is
waiting at the edge of Wilmington's downtown square
for the bus she takes to work.

"I worry every day, seeing if I can save some money
for my retirement, but I really can't because I have
to think about my kids," she says.

She supports Kerry but isn't sure whether she'll find
time to vote.

Married women, who often have the security of two
paychecks in a household, are more likely to cite
Bush's leadership against terrorism as a compelling
reason to support him.

The suburban women dubbed "soccer moms" in 2000 have
been renamed "security moms" in the wake of the Sept.
11 attacks. 

One of the TV ads the Bush campaign is airing is aimed
straight at them: "I can't imagine the great agony of
a mom or a dad having to make the decision about which
child to pick up first on September the 11th," the
president says.

"Safety, that's No. 1," says Donna Stranahan, 39, who
is married and has two children. She and a friend,
Kathy Garrett, are on their way back to work after
lunch.

"I feel like living in the world today, you have to
constantly be looking over your shoulder," agrees
Garrett, 46, who is married. 

She's enrolled her 10-year-old daughter in a karate
class to help ensure she can handle herself. 

She is registered as a Democrat but plans to vote for
Bush. 

"He had the gumption and the nerve to not just sit
there and keep getting hit in the face" after 9/11,
she says.

She faults President Clinton (news - web sites) for
not doing enough against terrorism and worries Kerry
"seems to say whatever everybody wants to hear." Bush
"isn't afraid to react," she says.

Too big to miss 

The marriage gap isn't new. In 1984, the difference in
the presidential votes of married and unmarried women
was 17 percentage points, according to surveys taken
as voters left polling places. There was a 21-point
marriage gap in 1992, a 29-point gap in 1996, a
32-point gap in 2000.

But the marriage gap didn't seem to get much attention
until the hair's-breadth results in 2000 intensified
the scrutiny of slices of the electorate and fueled
more aggressive efforts to get out the vote -
"micro-targeting," it's called in the trade. The
divide also has become more powerful as the number of
single people has grown and the difference in voting
patterns has increased.

"There's been a seismic shift in the demographics of
our country," Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg says.
In 1950, one-third of women ages 15 and older were
unmarried; now nearly half are. (There are 62.1
million married women, 52.5 million unmarried ones). 

There's a "marriage gap" among men, too. Married men
support Bush, 56% to 39%, the USA TODAY Poll shows.
Unmarried men support Kerry by almost the same margin,
55% to 40%.

But single women have received more attention from
strategists because there are more of them - nearly 47
million eligible to vote, compared with 38.4 million
men - and because women often settle on a candidate
later and are less firmly set on their choice.

Page Gardner, a Democratic consultant in Washington,
was intrigued by the "marriage gap" after 2000. Last
year, with a friend in San Francisco, she formed a
non-partisan group called Women's Voices Women Vote
that has financed research into why many unmarried
women don't vote. While 68% of married women voted in
2000, just 52% of unmarried women did. The conclusion:


Single women often felt their voices weren't heard and
didn't count. 

The group has combined Census, voting rolls and
consumer data to generate lists of nearly 20 million
single women in 12 battleground states. Non-partisan
groups can borrow the lists to register voters;
partisan groups can rent it to target them.

It's possible that single women could be to Democrats
what evangelical Christians have become to
Republicans: a huge group of people who often haven't
been engaged in politics before but hold many views in
sync with the party. Efforts to organize evangelicals
by the Christian Coalition and other organizations
over the past quarter-century have made them a key
part of the Republican base. 

One difference: Evangelical Christians are organized
through their churches into networks that make it
easier to identify and reach them. Single women
aren't.

One registration at a time 

In Bethesda, Md., just outside Washington, D.C.,
retired labor lobbyist Ann Hoffman greets five
volunteers who show up in a borrowed office for an
after-hours phone bank co-sponsored by Women's Voices
Women Vote and the USAction Education Fund.

Amy Berger, 48, a lawyer by training who is now a
stay-at-home mom, logs on to a Web site that
automatically dials phone numbers from a list of
unmarried, unregistered women in Pennsylvania as it
displays their names, addresses and ages on the
screen.

She gets off to a slow start. 

The first nine calls reach answering machines and
wrong numbers. A 92-year-old woman who answers the
10th call declares, "I'm no longer going to vote,"
then hangs up. On the 11th call, Berger coaxes a
58-year-old woman in Lebanon, Pa., who had let her
registration lapse to sign up again; she registers as
a Republican.

Another small victory on the 20th call: Ann Kuhns, 52,
a divorced woman from Lititz, Pa., jumps at the chance
to register for the first time; she files as a
Democrat. "I didn't pay much attention to politics
before," Kuhns says in a phone interview later, but
this year she "can't wait" to vote for Kerry. She's
lost several jobs in the past few years as companies
have moved operations abroad, and she sees her mother
struggling to afford prescription drugs. "It really
matters this year," she says. 

At the end of the night, the group's total: 13 new
voters registered. One at a time.




		
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