Republican commentators concerned about their party’s underperformance with women have offered a simple prescription: Get them to put a ring on it. Conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk has suggested that delaying marriage and taking contraception “screws up female brains” and makes women more likely to vote for Democrats. Fox News’s Jesse Watters has alleged that “Democrat policies are designed to keep women single … Once women get married, they vote Republican.” In their thread encouraging Republicans to adopt muscular pro-family policies, the advocacy group America 2100 said promoting marriage and family is “not just what’s good for the country; it’s a matter of political survival.”
Much of that narrative has been fueled by a viral chart based on CNN exit polling, which estimated that Republicans won the majority of votes among men and married women, while unmarried women broke for the Democrats by 37 points. In his writeup, Washington Examiner editor Conn Carroll wrote that “until we find a solution for our nation’s marriage crisis, the family will continue to fall apart. Also, the Democratic Party will win more elections.”
There is clearly a relationship between marital status and partisanship. But the key to interpreting the stylized fact that “married voters prefer Republicans” is to remember who gets married in the first place. Marriage has gone from the cultural default to something people self-select into. And as marriage rates decline across the board, those who are married will tend to be whiter, more religious, and (crucially) older than those who aren’t.