The Republican Marriage Advantage - GOP still the party of marrieds
October 31, 2024(Charlottesville, VA.)—For Immediate Release
Contact: Chris Bullivant
But Single And Divorced Men Are Drifting from Democrats
New research from the Institute for Family Studies shows a large and growing “marriage gap” between Republicans and Democrats. The marriage gap in support for Harris/Trump, for instance, is about as large as the gender and education gaps in presidential preferences.
Marriage gap is as big as gender and education gap in Harris/Trump support
Republicans are more likely to be married and happily so. From 2000 to 2022, the gap in the share of Republicans and Democrats who were married grew from 10% to 15%, with Republicans edging out Democrats. Among those who are married, Republicans are about 9 percentage points more likely to be “very happy” in their marriages. These trends seem to be in part because Republicans are more likely today to embrace marriage-related values and virtues than Democrats.
But some single men are drifting from the Democrats. Single men, including divorced men, are among those increasingly voting Republican.
Report author Wendy Wang says:
“Marriage is in retreat across the board, but especially so among Democrats, which means we are now witnessing a growing ‘marriage gap’ between Republicans and Democrats, where Republicans are markedly more likely to put a ring on it. This is a troubling trend, given the benefits marriage offers.”
Report author Brad Wilcox says:
“Given Trump’s history of serial infidelity and divorce, you might expect the longstanding link between the Republican Party and marriage to have eroded. But we do not see much evidence of such erosion. Republicans are more likely to be married, and to embrace marriage-related values and virtues, than Democrats. The contemporary affinity between marriage and the Republican Party is partly a consequence of the fact that marriage-minded Americans have nowhere else to go, party-wise, as the Democratic Party and its leaders are much less likely to express support for the institution of marriage than Republican leaders.”
The one complication to the general affinity between the Republican Party and marriage is that a growing number of unmarried men are departing the Democratic Party for the Republican side.
Wilcox added:
“It has been long assumed that the rise of single Americans was going to be uniformly good for the fortunes of the Democratic party, but with a growing ideological divide between single men and single women, what we are seeing is a potential South Korean-style situation emerge here in the United States. This is one where a growing number of single men, especially divorced middle-aged men and never-married young men, are leaving the Democratic Party for the Republican Party. It will be important to keep an eye on this migration of unmarried men to the Republican Party next week.”
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