Calling GOP! Sailer Vindicated On Marriage Gap…And Immigration?
The prominent
Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner
Research, headed by Stanley Greenberg, has issued an
important analysis of the 2004 Presidential election.
It validates my
recent conclusion on VDARE.com: the "Marriage
Gap" is the single best way to understanding why
states vote Republican or Democrat.
As you will recall, I
found that Bush`s share of the vote by state correlated
(at the extraordinarily high level of
r = 0.91, in
quant speak) with the average years married among
white women ages 18 to 44 in those states.
And, I went on to
argue, GOP success depends far more than you`d
expect upon whether voters can
afford a house big enough for a spouse and several
children.
Some readers
countered that, to be sure that marriage matters, I
needed to look at the individual level as well as the
state level.
Well, now Greenberg`s
individual polling data has confirmed my approach.
Greenberg`s new
report "Unmarried
Women in the 2004 Presidential Election"
[PDF format]
finds that:
"The marriage gap
is one of the most important cleavages in electoral
politics… The marriage gap is a defining dynamic in
today`s politics, eclipsing the gender gap, with marital
status a significant predictor of the vote, independent
of the effects of age, race, income, education or
gender."
Greenberg apparently
has access to the unpublished individual level data from
the 2004 exit poll data. So he can do
"cross-tabulations" on narrow demographic
breakdowns.
(How about those exit
polls? While I was,
correctly, disputing their initially inflated
Hispanic share figures for Bush, I contended that the
2004`s exit poll was unusually shoddy. And last week, my
assessment was confirmed by the polling company`s own
report on its performance—as summarized by
Mystery Pollster. Still, the figures for single vs.
married voters seem relatively untroubled, and they
coincide well with
my own analysis of the raw exit poll data from the
2002 Congressional elections. The 2004 exit poll numbers
also aren`t too far off from a
phone poll Greenberg conducted right after the
election.)
Greenberg found that:
"Unmarried women
voted for Kerry by a 25-point margin (62 to 37 percent),
while married women voted for President Bush by an
11-point margin (55 percent to 44 percent)… This was
true of all age groups…"
You may have heard a
lot about how
young voters went heavily for Kerry (54-45 over
Bush). But that`s largely because
young voters are
less likely to be married. Greenberg writes:
"Unmarried 18- 29
year olds gave Kerry a 25 point margin, while younger
married women, like their older counterparts, gave
President Bush an 11 point margin."
Greenberg built a
multiple regression model and found:
"Marital status
was a statistically significant predictor of likelihood
to vote for Kerry…This is true even when controlling for
other demographic and behavioral factors such as
gender, age,
race,
gun ownership,
union household membership, party identification,
education, income, and church attendance.
“Controlling for
all these other variables, the odds of voting for
Kerry were 1.56 times greater if the voter was unmarried
than if the voter was married.
“In contrast, once
other demographic and behavioral factors were controlled
for, a voter`s gender had no significant effect
on their likelihood to vote for the Democrat."
[Italics are Greenberg`s.]
That 1.56 times greater likelihood of voting for Kerry
if you are single is a remarkably large effect when you
consider that Greenberg is statistically controlling for
party identification along with a laundry list
of other famous demographic factors.
Lately, I`ve been
concentrating on analyzing
non-Hispanic white voters. So, of course, I`ve been
getting
smeared as a racist.
But professionals
like Greenberg understand that to understand American
elections, you have to break out whites separately. They
are so
numerically dominant and they have such distinctive
voting dynamics.
Whites cast a
majority of the votes everywhere except
Hawaii and the
District of Columbia. They are much more variable
than
blacks or other minorities. Bush`s share of whites
varied from only 40 percent in Massachusetts and Vermont
to 85 percent in Mississippi—a 45-point range.
In contrast, Bush`s
share of blacks varied only from 3 percent in D.C. to 28
percent in Oklahoma—a 25-point range. (Bush won
58 percent of the white vote but only 11 percent of
the black vote.)
Stanley Greenberg`s
liberal credentials are unassailable—he`s Clintonista
James Carville`s partner in
Democracy Corps. And he`s good at giving Democrats
bad news—he
warned them that their support for
affirmative quotas was killing them in the 1980s
(not that Bush Administration
policy has been much different). So he puts a lot of
effort into understanding the white vote. For example,
before the election he issued a
memo advising Kerry to focus on eleven particular
demographic slices. Ten were specific white groups, such
as "White non-college educated women."
Similarly, in this
new report Greenberg breaks out the white unmarried
vote. One big reason for this: single voters as a whole
include a much higher proportion of blacks (i.e., blacks
don`t get married much
these days). So without specifically focusing just
on white voters, it`s hard to tell whether the Marriage
Gap really does drive how people vote … or whether the
Marriage Gap is just a side effect of the Race Gap that
we already know is so deep.
Answer:
according to Greenberg, even among whites, the Marriage
Gap is still a chasm.
Bush
carried merely 44% of the single white females but 61%
of the married white women—a 17 point difference.
Among
white men, Bush won 53% of the singles and 66% of the
married—a 13 point difference.
Marriage seems to narrow the gender gap by encouraging
wives to vote more like their husbands. Among single
whites, the gender gap is 9 percentage points, but among
married whites, it`s only 5 points.
It`s
likely that
wedlock makes women more Republican for at least two
reasons.
- Married women tend
to be financially less dependent on
government jobs,
welfare, and
Social Security than are their single sisters.
- Husbands seem more
likely to persuade wives to adopt their political
worldviews than vice-versa. Maybe this is because men
tend to follow national and international affairs more
closely than women do, as
Kate O`Beirne has documented.
Nonetheless, while marriage has a bigger impact on
women`s Republican voting than men`s`, it strongly
affects both sexes. Hence that 13 point gap between
single and married white men`s GOP propensity.
It`s
not hard to make up a long list of reasons why marriage
inclines people to vote Republican:
- Married people are
more likely to be homeowners than renters.
- Children make you
more
culturally conservative.
- Having children to
protect encourages you to move away from "diverse"
(i.e.
dangerous) neighborhoods.
And
that`s just a start.
As I
point out in my article in the current issue of
The American Conservative entitled A Tale of
Two States: America`s Future is Either Texas or
California (click
here for an excerpt),
the Golden State had relatively high rates of white
fertility and marriage up through the 1988 election. And
that election marked the ninth time in ten Presidential
campaigns that California had gone Republican.
But
when the 1986 illegal immigrant amnesty got into gear,
it helped overwhelm California`s real estate market and
public schools.
Wedding
and birth rates among California whites dropped to among
the lowest in the country.
Not
coincidentally, California has voted for Democratic
Presidential candidates by 10 to 13 point margins in the
last four elections.
If
California is a forerunner in this, as in so much else,
the future looks brighter for the Democrats than it may
appear right now.
As
Greenberg notes about his favorite demographic group`s
performance in the last election:
"In a year with
high turnout, unmarried women increased their numbers,
and were one of the few demographic groups to increase
their share of the electorate. As a percentage of the
electorate, they moved from 19 percent in 2000 to 22.4
percent in 2004, an increase of roughly 7 million
votes."
Moral
for Republicans: you should be actively striving to
help Americans afford to get married.
The
single most obvious way to do this: boost
wages, cut
housing costs, and make
public schools more
acceptable— by cutting down on immigration.
[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily
blog.]


