In the avalanche of election takeaways, a group of ardent Republican supporters has skated by unnoticed, and a group of stalwart Democratic partisans has also been mostly ignored.
By now, you’ve heard some of the most popular interpretations of the results of the 2024 Presidential election: The manosphere ruled – it grabbed young men by their resentments and never let go. Those men powered Trump’s win. Young women were turned off by that. They were inspired by Harris, and when she lost, many declared themselves done with men. But wait, a wide swath of women, the white ones, were at fault; they let down the sisterhood by voting for Trump.
From my perch as a scholar of singlehood and a 71-year-old lifelong single woman, I’m struck by what’s been missed by overlooking marital status as a lens for parsing partisanship. I also know from my research that what it can mean to be single is far more heartening than what is implied by the focus on animosities between men and women.
Here are five takeaways.
(Please note that exit poll data have been updated. The new percentages can be found here. They only changed slightly.)
- Married men supported Trump by a wide margin.
The young men (18-29) who have garnered so much attention for their move toward Trump favored him by only 2 points, 49% vs. 47%, according to exit polls. In contrast, a group that has evaded critical attention, married men, favored Trump by 22 points, 60% to 38%.
Among white voters, the educational divide loomed large. Voters without a college degree overwhelmingly favored Trump (by 34 points), while college graduates favored Harris (a 7-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% vs. 43%).
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 just about the same degree as married men voted for Trump, 21 percentage points (59% vs. 38%). Married women supported Trump by 3 points (51% vs. 48%) and unmarried men supported Trump by 2 points (49% to 47%).
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 for Harris’s loss – white women. They voted for Trump over Harris, after voting for him over Biden and also over Clinton. 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 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% to 45%. But taking marital status into account, it was only the white married women who voted for Trump, 56% to 43%. The white unmarried women voted for Harris, though just barely, 49% to 47%.
- 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 a 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” (a term I coined) was unfair.
The Democratic party is especially attuned to injustices and inequality, whereas the Republicans are more likely to deride those concerns 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.
- The theme of the war between the sexes obscures a more powerful and heartening reason for why so many people are single.
The narrative of the growing chasm between the Trump-voting young men and Harris-voting young women suggests that today’s adults are single because they have had it with the field of broken romantic dreams. Undoubtedly that’s true for some. But they may be the exceptions.
In a 2022 national survey of solo single people (not married, not cohabiting, and not in a committed romantic relationship), more than half (56%) said they were not interested in a romantic relationship or even a date. When asked why, the most popular answer, endorsed by 72 percent, was that they just liked being single.
I’ve been studying people I call “single at heart.” They love being single and they are drawn to single life by all it has to offer. They are happy and flourishing because they are single, not in spite of it.
From the life stories they shared with me, I learned that they have big, open-hearted perspectives on family, intimacy, and love. To them, family often includes not just the people we typically think of as family, but also the people they choose to treat as family. Intimacy can include sexual intimacy, but emotional intimacy is cherished too. Love can encompass so much more than just romantic love; many enjoy the love of people and entities such as friends, relatives, mentors, spiritual figures, and pets, and offer their own love in return.
By decentering romantic partners, the single at heart are not narrowing their social and emotional worlds but expanding them. They are telling us a wholly different and more heartening story about what it can mean to be single than the one that sullies our imagination when we hew too closely to the storylines from the latest election.
[Notes: (1) The opinions expressed here do not represent the official positions of Unmarried Equality. (2) I’ll post all these blog posts at the UE Facebook page; please join our discussions there. (3) Disclosure: Links to books may include affiliate links. (4) Versions of this post will be shared on other blogs, with the permission of UE. (5) Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash (6) For links to previous columns, click here.]
About Bella DePaulo
