What bridges the gender gap? Marriage.
Debunking a 2024 trope.
Wives secretly defying their MAGA husbands to vote for Kamala Harris was a thing a few clever video producers tried to will into existence last fall, with ads from Vote Common Good and the Lincoln Project driving this theme in the closing days of the election. But if anything, the undue pressure on spouses seemed to go in the other direction, with husbands slightly more likely to report feeling pressure from their wives to vote a certain way than the other way around.
But the whole construct around this ad is wrong in another way: in private survey responses, married men and women are much likelier to mirror each other’s political leanings, compared to huge political gender divides among single and divorced Americans.
There’s been a robust conversation around the divergent political paths of young men and young women. This conversation gets at something real, but discounts another variable: marriage. The youngest voters are the likeliest to be unmarried. And political divides among singles are greater than among married voters across the board, not just for young people, but Americans overall.
Let’s look at simple split by marital status and gender:
The gender gap is a yawning 24 points among single people — women are D+28 to men who are D+4 — that shrinks to just 8 points among married people, where men are R+16 and women are R+8.
And when people who were once married go their separate ways, the divide reopens. There’s a similar 24 point gap among the separated and divorced, where men are R+17 and women are D+7.
We see the gap quite notably with younger voters. Single men aged 18-34 are evenly divided politically but women are Democrats by a 48-22 point margin. But this stark Democratic preference isn’t limited just to young single women. Single women at all ages are Democrats by a margin approaching 30 points. Recent Trump gains among young single men are probably what makes the divide appear as big as it is. While single men as a group lean Democratic by 4 points, the parties are tied among 18-34 single men.
The point here is that singles of all ages are pretty politically divided along gender lines, though the younger cohort naturally commands most of our attention, since this is the one where the most marriage and future family formation will come from.
Notably, the gender gap entirely disappears for young married voters. These represent barely a quarter of young voters in our sample, but both male and female married 18-34 year-olds lean support Republicans by 8 points.
Much of this is simply the nature of the sample composition: those who marry at a relatively young age may do so because they are more family-oriented or religious. By the time people are in their 30s and 40s, married people will represent a bigger cross-section of people in their age group, so their partisanship won’t be quite as far off the group average. But it’s not the marriage gap that I want to highlight here per se, but the political likeness of married men and women.
Up through the age of 65, our data shows remarkable similarity in the partisan outlook of married couples, with no gender gap among the youngest voters, a 6-point gap among those 35-49, and functionally no gap for 50-64 year olds. Only for seniors do we see a larger 17-point gap emerge.1
So there seems to be something about marriage that brings men and women closer together in their politics. What ads like the one above want you to believe is that this is an illusion. Wives will say one thing to their husbands, and in the secrecy of the booth, vote the other way. Some conservatives might argue that it’s the other way around, weaving a narrative of Shy Trump husbands bullied by their liberal spouses into staying quiet. Neither narrative captures the reality of what’s happening, which seems more genuine and benign. Marriage involves coming together on larger values-infused questions, like how to raise kids or where to live. Why shouldn’t this also cause married couples to gravitate towards their partners' political beliefs?
This is due to an apparent shift left among married senior women in 2024.