The Marriage Gap

Gallup takes a look at the "marriage gap" in American politics. I'm always waiting for analysts to dig a bit deeper into this issue. Marriage would seem to be a trait that's correlated with a lot of other politically important elements of personal identity. For example, a white person is more likely to be married than is a black person and there is, of course, a large "race gap" in voting patterns. Similarly, one assumes that more religious people are more likely to be married than are less religious people. Twentysomething secular college-educated urbanites tend to be Democrats, and tend to be unmarried, but my strong sense is that married twentysomething secular college-educated urbanites are Democrats just like those of us who are unmarried.

What's really needed, in short, is a bigger sample and some multivariate regression to try to see if there's any reason to think that marriage is exercising a large independent influence on American political behavior.