2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumTo Hold Senate, Democrats Rely on Single Women (NYT 7/3/14)
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.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/03/us/single-women-midterm-elections.html
Some interesting comments out of the "NYT Picks":
The dumb:
Where'd you get your education, Fox News? Talk Radio? Have you SEEN the Christian Right's lobbying for Hobby Lobby?
Some more:
delrem
(9,688 posts)JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)to me. I am 71. I remember the pre-Roe v. Wade days. I remember when REPUBLICANS REFUSED TO PASS THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT. Democrats supported that insurance policy in our Constitution. Unfortunately, Republicans got their way.
I remember at less than five years old pretending to have a desk in which I could file papers on which I have assuredly scribbled all my ideas even though I couldn't write at all. My vocation was obvious then -- just barely out of the toddler stage. But no one would ever have steered me toward a career that should have been my destiny and that I only found out about very late in life. Why? Because I was a girl, a lower middle-class girl born in 1943, too early to benefit from the work of other women to establish gender equality.
Gender equality? You can thank the Democratic Party for what there is of that.
There have been some outstanding Republican women, but it took the Democratic Party to open the doors not just for them but for all the women in the country.
So yes, that constituency matters to the Democratic Party even when elections aren't underway.