Writing for the American Enterprise Institute, Ruy Teixeira and colleagues look at the “marriage gap” in voting profiles, comparing it to the “gender gap.” They argue the two interact.
Married men are most likely to vote Republican, followed by married women. They are followed by unmarried men who are slightly more likely to vote Republican than Democrat. On the other hand, unmarried women vote Democrat by about 2 to 1.
What isn’t mentioned by Teixeira et al. is how the class issue interacts with this data. The upper classes are more likely to be married, but also more likely to be college grads - both of these are facts. We are told by various pundits the married are more likely to vote Republican but also told college grads are more likely to vote Democrat.
Something doesn’t make sense here. Without the data in front of me, I can’t begin to speculate how that apparent conflict in claims can be resolved.
It seems likely somebody has analyzed it wrong, doesn’t it? Or that the relationships between marriage and education level versus voting are less straightforward than has been claimed.
