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Key points
- Two key voting groups—married men and unmarried women—have been overlooked for decades.
- Married men are more likely to vote Republican, while unmarried women are likely to vote Democrat.
- Concern about gender discrimination and bias against single people can influence a person's voting choices.
In the tsunami of analyses and opinion pieces about the results of the 2024 U.S. Presidential election, a group of ardent Republican supporters has skated by unnoticed, and a group of stalwart Democratic partisans has also been mostly ignored.
Both groups have been consistent in their voting for decades and also, for the most part, consistently overlooked. Yet studying these voting patterns qualifies some conclusions that have already been solidified into the accepted understanding of what happened in 2024.
The key groups are married men and unmarried women. From research in political science and other social sciences, we have some potential insights into the psychology of why marital status is such an important factor in how people vote.
Married men supported Trump by a wide margin.
One of the groups that has been the focus of relentless post-election analysis and punditry is young men (18-29). But they favored Trump by only 1 point, 49 percent vs.48 percent, according to exit polls (updated on Nov 25, 2024). In contrast, married men favored Trump by 22 points, 60 percent to 38 percent.
Another topic of intense interest has been the educational divide among white voters. White voters without a college degree overwhelmingly favored Trump (by 34 points), while college graduates favored Harris (an 8-point advantage). White married women, unmarried men, and unmarried women with college degrees all voted for Harris. But white married men who were college graduates voted decisively for Trump (54 percent vs. 43 percent).
The lopsided support of Republicans by married men is nothing new. They voted for Trump over Biden in 2020 and for Trump over Clinton in 2016, by wide margins both times. Previous presidential elections showed the same pattern. According to Edison Research exit polls, married men supported Romney over Obama in 2012, McCain over Obama in 2008, and Bush over Kerry in 2004.
Unmarried women supported Harris by a wide margin.
Unmarried women voted for Harris over Trump to about the same degree as married men voted for Trump, 23 percentage points (61 percent vs. 38 percent). Married women supported Trump by 5 points (52 percent vs. 47 percent). Unmarried men were evenly divided, 48 percent for each.
Unmarried women’s favoring of Democrats has also been consistent. They supported Biden over Trump in 2020 and Clinton over Trump in 2016. They also favored Obama over Romney in 2012, Obama over McCain in 2008, and Kerry over Bush in 2004.
One group of women has come in for special blame by Harris supporters for her loss—white women. They voted for Trump over Harris, after voting for him over Biden and also over Clinton. Opinion writers expressed their exasperation and anger under headings such as “There’s no mystery. White women handed Trump the election,” “How white women doomed Kamala Harris and the Democrats – again,” and “Democrats keep expecting white women to save them, and they keep getting burned.” The betrayal, they said, was particularly galling in 2016 and 2024, when white women were voting against a woman. Where’s the sisterhood?
It is true that, in general, white women favored Trump, 53 percent to 46 percent. But taking marital status into account, it was only the white married women who voted for Trump, 56 percent to 43 percent. The white unmarried women voted for Harris, 51 percent to 47 percent.
Want sisterhood? Single women may be a better bet than married women. That may help explain why they vote for Democrats more reliably.
As changes to women’s experiences and opportunities ripple through the nation, single women think about them differently than married women do. Social scientists Christopher T. Stout, Kelsy Kretschmer, and Leah Ruppanner found that when 2,370 women were asked, “Do you think that what happens generally to women in this country will have something to do with what happens in your life?” single women (never married and divorced) were more likely than married women to agree that it did.
In the workplace, for example, issues relevant to all women, such as pay equity, may be especially important to single women who rely solely on their own earnings. In contrast, women married to men may be less concerned about those issues, especially if their husbands earn all or most of the household income. When evaluating policies and practices, single women may be more likely to ask, “What’s in it for women?” whereas women married to men may be more likely to wonder, “What’s in it for my husband?”
That matters. Stout and his colleagues showed that the more women saw their own fate as linked to the fate of women more generally, the more likely they were to identify as liberal and as Democrat. In the study, single women differed from married women in important ways, such as their income, their employment status (e.g., employee, homemaker), whether they had children, and their attitudes toward traditional gender roles. But none of those factors accounted for the marital status differences in partisanship as powerfully as the feeling of being all in it together with other women.
Married men and unmarried women differ markedly in how they think about issues of fairness for single people. That may help explain their divergent voting patterns.
Unmarried women are more likely than unmarried men, married women, or married men to believe that “society’s laws, policies, and practices favor married people and couples over single people,” according to a 2022 YouGov survey of a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. Asked whether it is unfair that single people sometimes pay more in taxes than married people, or that they do not have the same access to health insurance or Social Security, or that there are no legal protections from housing or employment discrimination based on marital status, married men were always the least likely to agree that this “singlism” (as I call it) was unfair.
Social justice concerns have long been important to the Democratic party. Republicans, especially in recent years, are more likely to deride concerns about discrimination and inequality as wokeism. That may be another reason why unmarried women are especially likely to vote for Democrats and married men for Republicans.
Stout and his colleagues did not ask about singlism in their study, but they did ask about gender discrimination. They found that the single women were more likely than the married women to believe that sexism limits women’s career opportunities. That was an important factor in explaining why single women were more likely than married women to be liberal and Democrats. (Men were not included in their study.)
Of course, there are likely to be other factors as well in explaining the psychology of voting by people of different marital statuses. Once marital status gets recognized as the vital factor that it is, maybe we will see more research on the topic.
