If you stop and visualize Philadelphia, what first comes to mind might be some stereotypically masculine imagery: Rocky running up the steps of the art museum, burly guys tearing into cheesesteaks, Eagles fans booing Santa Claus. So it may come as something of a surprise to you that one thing Philadelphia—or more precisely, Pennsylvania’s 2nd congressional district, which takes up about half of the City of Brotherly Love—leads the way in is unmarried women.
That’s actually important, from a political standpoint: unmarried women are a key Democratic constituency. In 2016 exit polling actually found a larger “marriage gap” than the gender gap (Hillary Clinton won unmarried voters 55-44 while Donald Trump won married voters 52-37). And one striking item that I found while looking at 2016 election results at the county level and comparing them to demographic data is that the percentage of unmarried women in a county is in fact the strongest predictor of Democratic vote share, stronger even than race, education, or density; there’s a 0.72 correlation between Hillary Clinton’s percentage of the vote in 2016 and the percentage of the women in a county age 15 or older who have never married (compared with, say, an -0.59 correlation with a county’s white population percentage).
I’m hardly the first person to observe this; many social scientists have focused on the concept of the second demographic transition, which can be summarized as what happens to birth rates in advanced societies (i.e. they decline, to sub-replacement levels). This happens through delayed marriage and delayed childbirth, increased cohabitation without marriage and without children, and increased levels of women working; it’s associated with a lot of positive outcomes, including less poverty and longer life expectancies. It’s also strongly associated, at least when you compare different states, with voting Democratic. (If you look at the chart below, you can see just how strong the relationship is between how states voted in 2016 and a combined “demographic transition” number based on factors like unmarried-ness and birth rates.)
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2qtYA7b
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