Pollsters have been tracking the gender gap since its emergence in the 1980 election. The marriage gap, though usually larger, has received considerably less attention. In 2022, however, pundits devoted significant attention to single and married women in large measure because of the Dobbs decision. As the 2024 races begin to come into focus, there are reasons to pay greater attention to this variable.
The exit pollsters usually ask voters if they are married. Voters who don’t check the box can be single, divorced, or widowed. In the 2022 National Election Pool network consortium (NEP) exit poll, 60 percent of voters indicated they were married. The NORC/AP VoteCast online survey did not include a marriage question in 2022, though they did two years prior. None of the early January national polls we reviewed included marriage as a basic category for analysis in their crosstabs.
In the 2022 exit poll, married and unmarried voters were almost mirror images of one another. Fifty-eight percent of married voters supported GOP House candidates while 59 percent of unmarried respondents voted Democratic. Married men and women did not differ significantly from one another: 59 percent of married men and 56 percent of married women voted GOP. But there was a large gap in the unmarried category: A bare majority of unmarried men, 52 percent, voted for GOP candidates; only 31 percent of unmarried women did.
Where 2022 exit poll data were available, we looked at several states where the abortion issue received significant attention, in Ohio, Georgia, and Texas—all states with more restrictive abortion laws—Republican governors who backed these laws won easily. In Ohio and Georgia, married women were less supportive of GOP governors Mike DeWine and Brian Kemp than married men; in Texas, married men and women were similar in their support for Greg Abbott. In Ohio, both unmarried men and women supported DeWine in his landslide victory, but unmarried women were significantly less enthusiastic. In Georgia, unmarried men and women supported Stacey Abrams, but unmarried women were more enthusiastic. In Texas, unmarried men split their votes in the race for governor, but unmarried women voted for Beto O’Rourke by 58 to 42 percent.
In Michigan, Democrat Gretchen Whitmer easily won reelection and Proposition 3, which amended the state constitution to protect all decisions related to pregnancy and abortion, passed with 57 percent of the vote. Forty-five percent of voters said abortion was the most important issue to their vote, far outdistancing inflation at 28 percent.* Married men voted 57 percent for Republican Tudor Dixon. Married women as well as unmarried men and women supported Whitmer. As the accompanying map shows, the abortion initiative received more support than the Governor in most counties—often by double digits. Interestingly, in majority-black Detroit and Flint, Prop 3 ran behind Whitmer. A similar pattern appeared in California, where the abortion initiative far outperformed Governor Gavin Newsom. In each of the four states above, non-married women were the most Democratic group and married men the most Republican. In every case, married women were more Democratic than married men. Unmarried women were also consistently more Democratic than unmarried men.
Understanding the unmarried share of the electorate will be increasingly important in coming years. Married voters are still a significantly larger share of the electorate than unmarried ones. But young people are marrying later, if at all. In 2021, according to General Social Survey data, only 15 percent of 18–29-year-old women were married, half of what it was in 2000. The young today are more ethnically diverse, less conventionally religious, and more Democratic or independent than previous generations.
Two trends confirm the liberalism of young women today. An Astin study of entering college freshmen found that in 2016, before the Me Too movement exploded, 41 percent of the women self-identified as liberal or far left, but only 28.9 percent of the young men did. Between 1966, when this survey began, and 1980, men were more liberal. The gap shrank during the Reagan administration, and since the late 1980s, women have been more liberal/left than men in their first year of college. Our AEI colleague Dan Cox showed a similar pattern using Gallup data from 1998 through 2021, with 44 percent of young women describing themselves as liberal in 2021 compared to 25 percent of young men. Additionally, as the August American Perspectives Survey shows, the Dobbs decision appears to be a significant generational moment for young women, who saw the decision as more ominous than their male counterparts. If young women carry these attitudes with them as they age, Democrats will reap the rewards.
*AP/VoteCast asked about the “most important problem facing the country.” In Michigan, 48 percent chose “the economy/jobs” and 12 percent abortion.
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