Why did the "marriage gap" shrink in 2016?
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November 10, 2016
By James A. Barnes
The gap between the voting patterns of married and single people has been a fixture of American elections: Married men and women tend to vote more Republican, while single people vote more Democratic. Over several election cycles that gap had grown to a chasm, and by the 2012 presidential election, the difference between how married folks voted and how singles voted was a whopping 41 percentage points in the television network exit polls.
But in 2016, the marriage gap shrunk for the first time since 1984, when this trend began to be measured in the exit polls. As the table below shows, two groups drove the closing in the marriage gap in 2016: married women shifted their partisan allegiance, voting Democratic—for Hillary Clinton—instead of for GOP nominee Donald Trump; and unmarried men became much less Democratic.
In 2012, single men voted for President Barack Obama over GOP nominee Mitt Romney by a 16 percentage point margin. In 2016, they barely sided with Clinton by one percentage point. And married women, who favored Romney by seven percentage points in 2012, switched sides and cast their ballots for Clinton by a margin of two percentage points. And since married women make up a larger share of the electorate than single men, that change among married women is just as consequential as the plunge in Democratic allegiance among unmarried men.
Unmarried women also became less Democratic in this election than they were four years ago, but that decline was much less pronounced than the Democratic drop among single men: single women still voted for Clinton over Trump by nearly a two-to-one margin. Meanwhile, married men remained solidly in the Republican camp in 2016 to nearly the same degree as they were in 2012, when nearly three out of five voted for Romney.
In the immediate aftermath of the election, it’s hard to know for sure why these different groups altered—or mostly didn’t, as was the case with married men—their voting patterns. But a couple of explanations seem worth considering: married women, particularly those with children, could have been put off by Trump’s combative demeanor and scorching campaign rhetoric, including his sexist comments about women. The fact that Clinton would have been the first female president no doubt also played a role with some.
The more puzzling part of the marriage gap’s decline is the drop in Democratic preference among single people. A simple explanation for the change among single men is that they were attracted to Trump’s bravado and chauvinism. But that kind of analysis would seem to run counter to why so many single men favored President Obama, a cerebral and less emotive politician, in the last election. At the same time, single women also lost some of their Democratic leanings with Clinton as the first female presidential nominee of a major party. To many women, Clinton was an inspiration and her success would have broken the highest glass ceiling in the land.
Some political analysts have attributed the more-Republican leanings of married people to the notion that the institution of marriage leads people to be less reliant on government because they can look to a spouse and family for various means of support, both financial and emotional, in tough times. Mario Cuomo, the Democratic governor of New York from 1983 through 1994, was an icon to many in his party, admired and beloved for the way he championed the ideal of government as a caring family. Cuomo, a gifted orator, described it this way in his celebrated keynote address to the 1984 Democratic National Convention: “What a proper government should be,” said Cuomo, is “the idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another’s pain, sharing one another’s blessings.” Indeed, government can be a lifesaver for some single people. For an elderly single person who lacks a pension or savings, Social Security and Medicare are truly vital.
Since the financial collapse and the Great Recession, we’ve learned that the complexities of the international economy can limit what government can do to restore jobs and prosperity and protect people from some of the harsh realities of globalization. Meanwhile, the partisan gridlock and bickering in Washington have lead to fewer new comprehensive federal social welfare initiatives. (The Affordable Care Act was passed early in the Obama administration when Democrats controlled both the Congress and the White House.) In this environment, perhaps some single people have lost faith in government’s ability to solve their problems. And that lack of confidence could lead some single people to be less drawn to a presidential candidate who ran on the most progressive Democratic platform in the party’s history.
James A. Barnes is a senior writer for Ballotpedia and co-author of the 2016 edition of the Almanac of American Politics.
See also
- Presidential election, 2016
- Presidential battleground states, 2016
- Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016
- Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, 2016
