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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"As Numbers Grow, Single Women Emerge as Political Powerhouse"
As Numbers Grow, Single Women Emerge as Political PowerhouseBy JACKIE CALMES at the NY Times
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/07/03/us/single-women-midterm-elections.html?_r=1
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RALEIGH, N.C. The decline of marriage over the last generation has helped create an emerging voting bloc of unmarried women that is profoundly reshaping the American electorate to the advantage, recent elections suggest, of the Democratic Party. What is far from clear is whether Democrats will benefit in the midterm contests this fall.
With their Senate majority at stake in November, Democrats and allied groups are now stepping up an aggressive push to woo single women young and old, highly educated and working class, never married, and divorced or widowed. This week they seized on the ruling by the Supreme Courts conservative majority, five men, that family-owned corporations do not have to provide birth control in their insurance coverage, to buttress their arguments that Democrats better represent womens interests.
But the challenge for Democrats is that many single women do not vote, especially in nonpresidential election years like this one. While voting declines across all groups in midterm contests for Congress and lower offices, the drop-off is steepest for minorities and unmarried women. The result is a turnout that is older, whiter and more conservative than in presidential years.
Half of all adult women over the age of 18 are unmarried 56 million, up from 45 million in 2000 and now account for one in four people of voting age. (Adult Hispanics eligible to vote, a group that gets more attention, number 25 million this year.) Single women have become Democrats most reliable supporters, behind African-Americans: In 2012, two-thirds of single women who voted supported President Obama. Among married women, a slim majority supported Mitt Romney.
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HockeyMom
(14,337 posts)I stand with them, and not some old, religious MEN. I remember the "good, old days" and don't want my daughters, or all young women, to have to relive that.
Rozlee
(2,529 posts)The universal contempt from conservatives was toxic. We were the reason for every ill in America and from our corrupt seed would rise the Anti-Christ. Please, as if everyone blaming mothers for what's wrong with their kids hasn't been fashionable since the myth of Eve biting into the apple and cursing her offspring. It's just one more demographic that the GOP has lost. A party that is 90% non-Hispanic white just keeps marginalizing itself more and more each day. Their 'big tent' became a pop-up.
sheshe2
(83,791 posts)The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee calls its new voter-mobilization program Rosie, evoking Rosie the Riveter, for Re-engaging Our Sisters in Elections. Among outside groups, the Voter Participation Center has sent registration materials to single women in 24 states, including North Carolina, and will follow up through the fall.
Emilys List and Planned Parenthoods action fund are heavily engaged, and they will spend $3 million each on their top priority: Ms. Hagans race here against the Republican Thom Tillis. Of Planned Parenthoods 140,000 members statewide, 50,000 joined since Republicans took power in 2011.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/07/03/us/single-women-midterm-elections.html?_r=2
Thanks apple.
dem in texas
(2,674 posts)I have two daughters that fit the criteria. Both vote in Presidential elections and that is it. My older daughter did finally get engaged and worked as a volunteer for the Democrats at the phone banks during the last national election. My younger daughter gets upset about the strict abortion laws and closing of the Planned Parenthood clinics, but she claims she is too busy to get involved in politics.