Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Single women are the hot, must-have demo for the 2004 presidential race. But will they put out this November?
Apr 12, 2004 | It's nearly time to announce the winner of the race to be the new soccer moms for the 2004 presidential election -- that carefully carved out segment of the American population on whom pundits, pollsters, journalists and candidates have decided victory hinges. It looks as though it's almost final: after staving off fierce competition from NASCAR dads (blue-collar men), office-park dads (upscale suburban men), and Wal-Mart moms (working-class suburban women), 2004's snazzy political demographic of choice is going to be: single women.
"It's this monolithic, undiscovered demographic that marketing folks understand, but politicians don't," said Elaine Lafferty, the editor in chief of Ms. magazine. She added that while she hadn't yet seen numbers thoroughly persuading her this phenomenon is real, "it certainly is what the media is portraying."
What the media is portraying, in approximately one bazillion recent articles, is that on the political dinner table is my own young -- and available! -- demographic. According to a 2003 study by Democratic pollsters Celinda Lake and Stan Greenberg, that single female demographic would -- if subtly coerced into enfranchisement -- lean left. So Democratic presidential strategists should consider us a big, tasty filet mignon: tender, juicy, and just waiting to be ravished.
It's all based on statistics, of course. According to Census numbers, there were 16 million unmarried, unregistered female voters in 2000, and 22 million single women who registered but did not vote. Six million registered singleton women did not pull a lever in an election that came down to a half-million votes nationally. And even though the 6 million non-voters include never-married women, women who live with partners, widows and divorcées of all races and economic backgrounds, you can practically hear analysts and journalists coughing "Carrie Bradshaw" under their breath. Some haven't even bothered to cover their mouths; the unnerving phrase "Sex and the City Voters" has now appeared in several publications.
It's a yoke I am not particularly eager to bear. I am this demographic: a woman, 25 to 34, who has never married. But I vote, and so do all my single girlfriends. Or so they proclaim, loudly, until they get a few beers in them and one or two admit that maybe they didn't, in 2000, because it didn't really matter in New York anyway -- Gore was winning the state by a landslide. And then a few more -- political activists even -- admit that while they hit the polls for the presidential elections, they have failed to do so for local and state elections. And just about none of them bothered to vote in the March presidential primary. "I don't know why I didn't," said one of my oldest friends, a 29-year-old. "I'm bad, I guess." My 24-year-old buddy said simply of her most recent failure to turn up at the polls, "I didn't feel informed enough."
It turns out there are statistics that could back up the argument that it's us urban single broads creating a sinkhole in the youth voting statistic. After all, "the new spinster" is an exploding population. The percentage of women 30 to 34 who have never been married rose from 6 percent in 1970 to 22 percent in 2000. Among women 40 to 44 years old in 2000, 20 percent were childless, a figure that had nearly doubled since 1980. And Eleanor Smeal, the president of the Feminist Majority Foundation who coined the term "gender gap," emphasized that while the overarching statistic -- 68 percent of married women voted in 2000 compared to 52 percent of single women -- the real factor seems to be age. It's the population of young, never-married women who are creating the difference: 57 percent of married 25- to 44-year-olds claimed to have voted in 2000, compared to 47 percent of never-married women in the same age bracket.
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