All the Single Democratic Ladies

I n 2022, according to exit polls, unmarried women voted for Democratic House candidates at a slightly more than two-to-one ratio (68–31 percent). Every other quadrant of voters — married men, unmarried men, and married women — gave majorities to Republican candidates. The voting proclivities of unmarried women have therefore gotten some attention in the last few weeks, and the discussion has sometimes been less than wholly sensible. A few points worth keeping in mind:

This is a long-standing pattern. In nearly every election, unmarried women vote for Democrats at higher rates than the other groups. In 2004, unmarried women gave 37 percent of their votes to George W. Bush while married men gave him 60 percent.

Marriage is more strongly linked to voting behavior than sex. That too has been true for a long time. In 2004, married men were five points more Republican than married women, but 15 points more Republican than unmarried men.

The marriage gap and the gender gap have multiple causes. Social issues play a role: Polls regularly find a large gap in abortion views between married and unmarried people. So do economic issues: Unmarried women tend to have lower levels of financial security than others. Racial differences contribute to the gap, too: Black women, a heavily Democratic group, are less likely to be married than white women. Finally, there’s the “linked fate” hypothesis: Single women “are more concerned about the status of women as a collective group” than married women are (which itself helps explain the first group’s stronger support for abortion).

Between 2018 and 2022, unmarried women showed more stability in vote preferences than the other groups. The midterms during the Trump administration produced a Democratic wave (offset in Senate elections by a Republican-favorable map). Compared with then, married men in the recent elections gave eight points more to Republicans. Unmarried men voted eight points more Republican, too. Married women voted Republican by twelve additional points. Unmarried women were immune to this trend, swinging zero points toward the Republicans. (They were the same percentage of the electorate, 23, in both years.)

One possible interpretation: Dobbs, the Supreme Court decision denying that the Constitution protects abortion, prevented single women from making the same turn everyone else did.

Swings varied by state. In Ohio, Republican Mike DeWine improved disproportionately among unmarried women from 2018 to 2022 — after signing a six-week abortion ban with no exception for cases of rape. Ron DeSantis improved disproportionately among unmarried women, too, after signing a 15-week abortion ban. It would be unwise to put too much stock in these numbers — exit polls are notoriously prone to error, and the errors get bigger the smaller the sub-sample — but they suggest, again, that the simplest explanations for group differences in voter behavior may not be the most accurate ones.