The Swingle Vote

Single women voting power on deck.  The old elitist white guy politician look may not be the wave for much longer.

(Slate) These days your daughter, or even your mistress, is the better campaign target. As married women split their votes about equally between Democrats and Republicans, they are fading into the electoral woodwork, while single women are doing what only single women can do: switch alliances, hold out for the best deal, express their outrage by suddenly going cold on a candidate who has irritated them and then warm up quickly to a new one who makes a better offer.

The single woman, or “swingle,” as pollsters are now calling her, is already one of the largest voting blocs at 55 million, and that number is growing by almost 1 million voters a year—faster than any other group of voters broken out in the polls. Last year, single women made up one-quarter of voters overall—about the same number as self-identified white evangelical Christians. And if Obama’s strategy for courting these women works long term, pollsters say, single women might actually become the Democrats’ equivalent of the evangelicals—a reliable base for future elections.

Single women are made up of two distinct blocs. The first is of young, college-educated women who are getting married later, and make up about 30 percent of all single women. Every year since 2006 the median age for marriage has risen by a year; there are more single women in their 30s now than ever before. The college-educated single women are more likely to be working, living in cities, and progressive in their views. When Rush Limbaugh called Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke a “slut,” he merely confirmed the views of a lot of single women that he is “the sad loud man in a small room,” as Jessica Winter recently called him.