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Marital Status Is a Huge Factor in Political Preferences
Why do we so rarely hear about voters who are single in the barrage of polling results?
It is presidential election season in the US, and polling results are ubiquitous. Many polls from many different polling companies are released every day, and articles about polling results are often among the most popular stories on media websites.
Pollsters and reporters have their favorite categories, such as race, gender, religion, age, and education, along with various combinations of those categories, such as White evangelical Protestants or Black men. Rarely included in these polls is marital status. And yet, when political preferences are examined separately for people who are and are not married, the differences are striking, and often greater than the differences for the categories that get all the attention.
Pew research report findings on marital status
Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center published a detailed report of the political party preferences of many different groups of registered voters in the US. They reported the percentage of registered voters who were Republican (or leaned Republican) and the percentage who were Democrats (or leaned Democrat) by race, ethnicity…
