October 29, 2012

Why the media hype over the gender gap is silly

Here's a graph from my new VDARE.com article demonstrating why all the hubbub over Romney's "gender gap" ought to be small potatoes compared to Obama's seldom discussed "marriage gap."

Read the whole thing there.

19 comments:

Matthew said...

If those are the proportions in the election then Obama will win. Female voters outnumber male voters, and they're leaning more heavily for Obama than men are for Romney. But I think Romney will win, in part because Obama voters won't even bother to show up. Obama does really well amonng the apathetic.

What's frightening is that, if you assumed the Democratic Party had, in 1982, created a 30 Year Plan to boost the size of the left-leaning population then you would get...exactly what we've been getting: increases in legal immigration from non-white countries, no effort to stop illegal immigration, and every possible effort to slow down, reverse and discourage the formation of families.

And you could only assume that the Republican Party had never thought about how to boost the size of the right-leaning population. Ever.

We obsess here about left-leaning Hispanics, but Indians ("Hindus") are even more likely than Hispanics to support Obama. And Romney's plan is to drive the numbers of skilled immigrants (e.g., Indians) up, up, up.

Republicans should enjoy our victory next week, because unless the GOP changes it will probably be our last one for quite some time. My hope is that Romney loses heavily Hispanic Nevada but wins white working class Pennsylvania and Michigan. Maybe then they'll see the light. If that happens they may become more focused on doing things to hold PA and MI and not so much on winning the "growing Latino vote."

Let's! said...

The "Americans who have a life" line from the VDare piece is key.

We have so much sweat equity in this country - and nobody, nowhere who will take us in if it gets ruined.

We acknowledge that people who can flee to the suburbs don't care as much about the inner ring that they left, but the MSM won't concede the analogous truth - that people who can easily skedaddle to Mexico or Israel are, at a deep level, less than 100% invested in the consequences of their actions in the U.S.

Lugash said...

Republicans should enjoy our victory next week, because unless the GOP changes it will probably be our last one for quite some time.

Wow, someone is really optimistic about Romney.

Mercer said...

"emphasizing strange, symbolic micro issues of interest to only tiny numbers of voters: gays in the military; gay marriage; his mini Administrative Amnesty etc."

I live in a swing state so I see a lot of ads. I have not seen any about gays and amnesty from anyone. The subjects of Obama's ads are: rich peoples taxes, outsourcing, education spending, medicare and abortion rights.

Steve Sailer said...

And what has Obama done about rich people's taxes, outsourcing, etc.?

Bill said...

Yes, obviously the marriage gap is very important. So why is it that those who support the improbable expedient of outwardly eugenic policies so conscientiously ignore the problems with today's family law regime?

I wonder, sometimes, why people have such a hard time understanding that traditional religious norms concerning marriage and procreation are essentially applied eugenics. Also, why can't they see that feminism and a divorce-theft/single mother regime are the exact opposite?

Willful ignorance? Self-congratulatory psychology? Sublimated fantasies of having a harem at other men's expense?

I don't know what it is, but if you care about the future of our civilization and people, you really ought to be condemning feminism and all of its permutations in strong terms.

Anonymous said...

rise in age of marriage driven by women and education, and so for men too.

Whiskey said...

Steve, the Gender Gap is just a reflection of the Marriage Gap. Most White women are single, not married, for the first time. Ages of First Marriages keep going up and up. Generally, save for the upper 20% among Whites, as Murray noted, the trend line is to have kid(s) first, then maybe marry. And high rates of divorce and remarriage make things even more complex.

There is a faultline running between men and women in their late forties, among Whites, and those younger. Those on the younger side are mostly singletons, or spend most of their time as singletons, and are very unlikely to marry and stay married until widowhood as the those on the other side of the fault-line. I strongly suspect that the Marriage Gap is skewed because this age fault-line.

A couple who lives together, and has one or more children, but are not married, will be counted under your methodology as single. Even though this seems to be the norm for most couples under forty now, among Whites. Cohabitation at least before marriage.

Meanwhile a couple who are briefly married, before heading to the inevitable divorce that late second/third/fourth cohabitaiton/marriages produce, will be counted as married. As the age cohort on the older side of the fault line declines due to death, their replacements will be radically different.

It is one thing to marry in your mid-twenties, with both spouses having limited partner counts and for this to count as "Most Married People" in predicting voting. It is quite another for marriage to be some temporary thing in your late thirties followed by separation and/or divorce; in that case marriage ceases to be an accurate predictor of voting patterns.

Anonymous said...

"Most White women are single, not married, for the first time."

That is not true, stop lying Whiskey.


CJ said...

Your chart The Obama Fringe vs. the Romney Core is excellent. It needs to be widely disseminated; it explains more about the actual nature of political party affiliation today than a hundred outdated PolSci textbooks. One humble suggestion -- add some small print text to the graphic to the effect that the numbers are derived from declared voters only, and put your name in there as well.

irishman said...

Alas lads, I think the Republicans may well be the big problem when it comes to Affordable family formation.

The Republicans support those sectors of the economy whose existence in their current form makes Affordable family formation more difficult. Think student loans, healthcare, personal debt and off-shoring and immigration.

Mitt Romney doesn't strike me as a man who has had either an original or a verboten thought in his life. He'll do nothing for no-one.

CJ said...

Your chart The Obama Fringe vs. the Romney Core is excellent. It needs to be widely disseminated; it explains more about the actual nature of political party affiliation today than a hundred outdated PolSci textbooks. One humble suggestion -- add some small print text to the graphic to the effect that the numbers are derived from declared voters only, and put your name in there as well.

Noumenon said...

That was a really interesting article, Steve! Even though you ended up calling me "fringe" by the end of the article I felt like I deserved it.

I thought "well it's nice that someone is listening to the fringe," but then I thought "But they're not -- those people don't have any power, just votes." Lends credence to a "top and bottom against the middle" theory, where the top have all the power they need but not enough votes, and go to the fringe to get them.

Davani said...

For years, pollsters have been trying to explain why married women tend to vote Republican, while single women tend to vote Democrat.

No one has yet come up with an explanation that I would consider satisfying. Why wouldn't ALL women be concerned with women's rights, access to contraception, etc.? And why would one-half of women brazenly turn against their own sisters, the other half? Isn't there female solidarity when it comes to women's rights?

I have come up with a theory, however, which I haven't seen mentioned anywhere, which does seem plausible.

This problem is analogous to the "free-rider" problem widely known to anthropologists.

Married women with kids have made sacrifices in their lives, mostly by foregoing career advancement. If single women are given access to contraception, they can "have their cake and eat it too": they can continue with their career growth, while having an active sex life which results in no pregnancy and no costs and doesn't deter them from their career path. This is a 'free-rider' situation and married women with families are very angry that single women don't have to pay a price for their lifestyle -- a steep price which they, the married/family half of women, have paid in full by accepting the family route, by having kids.

It's pretty logical that married women would actually vote to *restrict* contraception/abortion rights for other women, because that would force the free riders to finally make a commitment to one or the other path, but not both.

Steve Sailer said...

Judging by how few vans you see these days with seating for more than five or six children, I suspect that most married women are happy to have contraception readily available.

CJ said...

Almost nobody, and I mean almost nobody, is interested in restricting contraception rights. They might want other people to pay for their own contraceptives, and they might want to know what their own children are doing, but nobody is voting against the right of others to use contraception.

Cail Corishev said...

"For years, pollsters have been trying to explain why married women tend to vote Republican, while single women tend to vote Democrat."

Which explains why, as Steve points out, "gender gap" turns up in Google about a million times more often than "marriage gap," right? I think you misspelled "ignore."

Yes, the idea that any candidate is going to take away contraception is a straw man, and a pretty tattered one at that. The only people who oppose contraception today are very traditional Catholics, and they don't want to ban it. None of them are running for office or anywhere near the ears of those who are. There's about as much chance of restrictions on contraceptives as there is of repealing female suffrage.

Married women oppose abortion and government-paid contraception because they think those things are wrong. That's all.

Anonymous said...

Wow, someone is really optimistic about Romney.


All the polls indicate that Romney will probably win. That's realism, not optimism.

Anonymous said...

Mitt Romney doesn't strike me as a man who has had either an original or a verboten thought in his life. He'll do nothing for no-one.


Setting your double-negative to one side, we don't want or need a person who has had "an original or a verboten thought in his life".

Which is just as well - I'd guess that among the seven billion people currently alive on Earth, none of them have had or will have "an original or a verboten thought" at any time in their lives.