Reply #3: Calling GOP! Sailer Vindicated On Marriage Gap…And Immigration?

[dzika]

(this appears to be a right-leaning article but interesting)

January 23, 2005

Calling GOP! Sailer Vindicated On Marriage Gap…And Immigration?

By Steve Sailer


The prominent Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, headed by Stanley Greenberg, has issued an important analysis of the 2004 Presidential election.

It validates my recent conclusion on VDARE.com: the "Marriage Gap" is the single best way to understanding why states vote Republican or Democrat.

As you will recall, I found that Bush's share of the vote by state correlated (at the extraordinarily high level of r = 0.91, in quant speak) with the average years married among white women ages 18 to 44 in those states.

And, I went on to argue, GOP success depends far more than you'd expect upon whether voters can afford a house big enough for a spouse and several children.

Some readers countered that, to be sure that marriage matters, I needed to look at the individual level as well as the state level.

Well, now Greenberg’s individual polling data has confirmed my approach.

Greenberg's new report "Unmarried Women in the 2004 Presidential Election" (PDF format) finds that:

"The marriage gap is one of the most important cleavages in electoral politics… The marriage gap is a defining dynamic in today’s politics, eclipsing the gender gap, with marital status a significant predictor of the vote, independent of the effects of age, race, income, education or gender."

Greenberg apparently has access to the unpublished individual level data from the 2004 exit poll data. So he can do "cross-tabulations" on narrow demographic breakdowns.

(How about those exit polls? While I was, correctly, disputing their initially inflated Hispanic share figures for Bush, I contended that the 2004's exit poll was unusually shoddy. And last week, my assessment was confirmed by the polling company's own report on its performance—as summarized by Mystery Pollster. Still, the figures for single vs. married voters seem relatively untroubled, and they coincide well with my own analysis of the raw exit poll data from the 2002 Congressional elections. The 2004 exit poll numbers also aren't too far off from a phone poll Greenberg conducted right after the election.)

Greenberg found that:

"Unmarried women voted for Kerry by a 25-point margin (62 to 37 percent), while married women voted for President Bush by an 11-point margin (55 percent to 44 percent)… This was true of all age groups…

continued
http://vdare.com/sailer/050123_vindicated.htm