Terence Jeffrey writes,
"The growing political importance of unmarried women is undergirded by a demographic shift that is fundamentally changing America," Greenberg Quinlan Rosner reported.
"Between 1960 and 2006, the percentile of the voting age population (as opposed to households) that was unmarried increased from 27 to 47 percent," the firm said. "If the current trend continues, the unmarried population will become a majority in the next 15 years. And while the number of married Americans aged 21-54 years is dropping in absolute terms for the first time ever, the number of unmarried couples who cohabitate and the number of women living without a spouse are on the rise."
..."In total, there are over 53 million unmarried women of voting age, a number that dwarfs the percentage of seniors, people of color and even union members," the pollsters report.
Either somebody figures out how to sell libertarianism to single moms, or we can look forward to a future of being wedded to the welfare state.
In other political science news, The Monkey Cage is a new blog that comes recommended by Omar Lizardo.
Exactly. Republicans do best in states with "affordable family formation," where people are more likely to get married and have a kid because they can afford to buy a house and because the local publics schools are good.
The correlations for the 2000 and 2004 elections by state with measures of affordable family formation are some of the highest in the history of social sciences:
http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2005/05/08/affordable-family-formation-the-neglected-key-to-gops-future/
True enough. Single women do vote Democrat much more often and tend to support every social program under the sun. This is what, according to evolutionary psychology, you would expect, since single women see the government as the one taking care of them, the way men used to. The ever-growing size of government only reinforces this. It would not surprise me if one could find a correlation between growing government "care" for people and a growing population of single women. Seems to me that would be a pretty easy send of trend lines to create, showing if this is the case in different countries, as the welfare state grows and shrinks, etc.
Is Omar Lizardo a relative of Emilio Lizardo?
An increase in unmarried women probably implies an increase in unmarried men, and I'd expect unmarried men to be the most libertarian demographic.
Are you conflating unmarried childless women with unmarried mothers?
But these come from opposite ends of the socioeconomic scale.
Unmarried childless women probably (according to the data Ive seen) work as many hours and earn as much as men.
The more years of education a women has, the less likely she is to marry or to have children.
My prediction is that the next big media story will soon (and for many years) be the loneliness of the clever and successful career woman.
Place on the socioeconomic scale has nothing to do with single female psychology, from an evolutionary psycholgocal POV esp.
This reminds me of the Economist graph of 20 years ago which showed the increase in unmarried black mothers against population growth in the US, and showed that by 2020 every person living in the US was going to be a black, unmarried mother.
Okay, so what does libertarianism have to offer a population which is explicitly dependent on nontrivial state services in order to maintain a basic standard of living?
Jobs, freedom, responsibility, dignity, positive self-worth
Reminds me of Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy where he ties the future of capitalism to the future of families. Capitalists, Schumpeter wrote, tended to be motivated by the desire to provide for their families even after the death of the capitalist. So they took a long-term view of economics. They were future oriented. Single people, especially young ones, tend to be very present oriented.
My wife became a social worker right out of college. She was, at the time, your typical young liberal. However, my wife is also a realist, and she lets what she sees inform her more than ideology. Thus, she quickly became greatly disillusioned with liberalism, seeing as she did what was really happening with welfare and those who are on it. She said maybe 10% of the people on welfare actually need it. The rest are working the system. She became apolitical and generally disillusioned and moved from San Antonio to Dallas to work as a bilingual teacher. It was in Dallas, in 2005, that she met me. We got married and had a baby. Now she's a libertarian Republican.