I suspect that without a late debate or a true October surprise, the chattering class needs something to talk about, and so this morning you can find a lot of articles and columns either berating or defending a commercial narrated by Julia Roberts, telling women “in the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want. And no one will ever know.” It’s a dark, dire, and spectacularly inaccurate assumption about why women usually vote for Republicans, but the fact that they’re running this ad says a lot about men, women, marriage, life, and politics.
You want to talk about the Julia Roberts ad? Fine. Let’s talk about it. I presume Lyle Lovett will not be giving the rebuttal.
Start with the fact that the gender gap is nothing new.
In every presidential election since 1980, a gender gap has been apparent, with a greater proportion of women than men preferring the Democrat in each case. The magnitude of the gender gap has ranged in size from four to twelve points since 1980. . . .
In every presidential election since 1996, a majority of women have preferred the Democratic candidate. Moreover, women and men have favored different candidates in presidential elections since 2000, with the exception of 2008 when men were almost equally divided in their preferences for Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain.
The same divide that manifests in the presidential vote appears in public surveys on a wide range of issues: “Women tend to be more supportive of gun control, reproductive rights, welfare, and equal rights policies than men. They tend to be less supportive of the death penalty, defense spending, and military intervention.”
It is not surprising that men and women see the world differently, both in politics and other parts of life. (My go-to anecdote here was going to be astrology, but fascinatingly, the numbers in this Harris survey indicated that men and women were equally likely to believe in astrology, and men actually pay more for astrological advice.)
Men and women are different. This doesn’t mean that one is better or worse than the other; they are complementary. Some of us believe that the reason people marry — or “pair-bond,” to use the term of the evolutionary biologists — is because that yin-and-yang balance is what’s needed, or perhaps optimal, to get through the world. One of my favorite books that I read long ago contended that when a man facing a big decision says, “I need to sleep on it,” he is either consciously or subconsciously saying, “I need to consult my wife.” This is not because he’s under her thumb; it’s because he knows that she, with her different perspective and life experience, will recognize things that he won’t and have some useful advice about whatever decision he’s facing.
(None of this is meant to say that if you’re doing something differently, I’m criticizing you. People get very touchy about this subject.)
Left-of-center analysts love to talk about the gender gap, because it represents one of the major advantages for the Democratic Party. (“Women have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980, with the turnout gap between women and men growing slightly larger with each successive presidential election.”) I suspect this is one of the reasons why one of the dominant narratives in our culture is “What’s wrong with men?” The subtext is often that men are a defective form of women who require some kind of fixing, rather than their own thing. (As one essayist noted, the women in our cultural and social elite love dissecting the topic of “What’s wrong with men,” but men seem to be much less enthusiastic about hashing it out.)
But there’s a thorny complication in the Democrats’ happy narrative, and it’s that married women vote Republican in much higher numbers than single women do. Married men vote Republican more than single men do, too. The Pew Research Center:
Married men and women are more likely to identify with or lean toward the Republican Party than their unmarried counterparts, with 59 percent of married men and half of married women oriented toward the GOP. . . .Women who have never been married are three times as likely to associate with the Democratic Party as with the Republican Party (72 percent vs. 24 percent).By a narrower — though still sizable — margin (61 percent to 37 percent), never-married men also favor the Democrats.
Now, perhaps that reflects that people who lean Republican are more likely to get married. But there’s also a compelling argument that marriage is a “Republican-ification” process for both men and women — it alters their worldview and values, and that has a downstream effect on their political views.
Why does marriage often make individuals more conservative? One big reason is kids, as parents suddenly A) have a big interest in the long-term condition of their community, state, and country; B) have a whole lot of new costs that make their taxes much more annoying; and C) must care about if their local schools are teaching the kids nonsense.
(A statement like that is almost guaranteed to bring out commentators who declare they were Democrats before having kids and remained Democrats after having kids. Great, do you want a medal or a monument?)
People call for sweeping changes when they have nothing to lose. When you have kids, you definitely have something to lose, and thus care a great deal about conserving that which is good in society. You aren’t quite as enthusiastic about being a vanguard of the revolution and turning everything upside down. We laugh at those Progressive Insurance commercials about people turning into their parents because we recognize ourselves in the not-so-young homeowners. All of a sudden, the minivan starts to look like a reasonable option because of the space for groceries in the back and side airbags.
Oh, and somewhere along the line, you probably saw an ultrasound of your child and your sense of when human life begins may well have been changed.
A good reflection of the Democratic Party’s vision of “the good life” — at least for everyone else — can be found in the Obama campaign’s interactive web ad, “Life of Julia.” If you’ve forgotten or weren’t paying attention to politics in 2012, Julia was a strangely pupil-less woman whose whole life was reliant upon the benevolent intervention of the Obama administration. (I know it will shock you to learn that the Obama campaign played fast and loose with the facts in its apocryphal tale of the woman with Little Orphan Annie eyes.) Julia had a child, but the father never appeared in the story and Julia never got married. As Jessica Gavora wrote at the time, “The decline of marriage and Democratic political opportunism have combined to transform what used to be a situation to be avoided — single motherhood — into a new and proud American demographic, citizens of Obama’s Hubby State.”
I mentioned “everyone else” above because you notice the Obamas, the Bidens, the Harris-Emhoffs, and the Walzes — as well as the Pelosis, Schumers, the Jeffrieses, and most other Democratic Party leaders — are married, and in most cases have been for a long time. This would be another case of the largely progressive American elite refusing to preach what they practice, as writers from David Brooks to Tim Carney to Charles Murray to Ed West have observed. A lot of elite Democrats might find the life of Julia unfulfilling without a spouse to come home to every night — particularly in those later years once the kids are off to college or moved out.
(A statistic I wish was more widely known: “After taking into account other factors that have been reported to contribute to suicide, divorced men still experienced much increased risks of suicide than divorced women. They were nearly 9.7 times more likely to kill themselves than comparable divorced women.” A possibly related statistic: 69 percent of divorces in heterosexual marriages are initiated by the wife.)
If you get married, have kids, and stay married, you’re going to have a smoother ride in life. And no (long sigh), this isn’t an attack on divorced people. Marriage is hard and we’re all rooting for you, but it’s probably not a good idea for two people to stay together if they constantly make each other miserable. If we can increase the marriage-satisfaction rate, we will likely lower the divorce rate.
Just as many cultural elites perceive men as defective women, the default setting of a lot of progressives is that a woman who doesn’t vote for the Democratic Party must be defective in some way. She must be uneducated or misled by “disinformation.” She must be succumbing to Republican fearmongering on illegal immigration or crime.
She must be corrupted or brainwashed by toxic masculinity if she can’t appreciate a true gentlemanly masculine role model like, you know, Doug Emhoff.
To many progressives, it is simply unthinkable that any significant number of women might look at what the modern Democratic Party has to offer — federal spending at such a runaway pace that it sets off the worst inflation in 40 years, a de facto policy of open borders by giving the tidal wave of asylum seekers court dates a decade from now, a revolving-door justice system where you can attempt to stab a gubernatorial candidate on stage and get released on your own recognizance later that day, lawmakers who call for a “balanced” approach when it comes to mass rapes committed by Hamas — and say “no thanks.” As mentioned earlier this week, a lot of Democrats walk around believing that the Biden administration is doing a terrific job, the economy is roaring, and the public has great faith in Kamala Harris’s abilities.
When they are confronted by the fact that married women actually favored Trump over Biden in the 2020 exit polls — 52 percent to 47 percent — the explanation that makes the most sense to Democrats is that these women must be voting Republican out of fear of their husbands.
Back in an interview with NPR in 2017, Hillary Clinton declared that her loss could be attributed in part to the fact that, “I’m talking principally about white women — they will be under tremendous pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers not to vote for ‘the girl.’” And then the following year, Clinton blamed white women for her defeat, declaring those in that demographic feel “ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”
(I know that when it comes to healthy, supportive, and clearly communicating marriages, our first thought is always of the Clintons, but do you see a lot of guys out there pressuring their moms to vote for a particular candidate?)
Marriages where one spouse is a Republican and one spouse is a Democrat are pretty rare — just 4 percent of all marriages, according to research by the Institute for Family Studies. It’s a little more common to have marriages where one spouse is a member of either party and the other is an independent. But in 79 percent of marriages, both spouses have the same party identification.
That ad narrated by Julia Roberts is a Jenga tower of inaccurate and faulty assumptions. But it’s not really meant to persuade married women Republicans or independents to secretly vote for Harris and tell their husbands they voted for Trump. It’s meant to make Democrats feel better if the exit polls show that most married women voted for Trump again. Just as the villain in a Scooby-Doo cartoon would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for those meddling kids, the Democratic candidate would have won if it wasn’t for all those abusive husbands.
