It was supposed to be the gender-gap election. In Iowa, pollster Ann Selzer had Vice President Kamala Harris beating former president Donald Trump by more than 20 points among women, which wouldn't have been that far off the 15-point margin President Joe Biden won them by in 2020. And Seltzer's margin was largely in line with the predictions of news outlets—with CBS reporting 12 points, NBC 16, and USA Today 17. But all of these prognostications turned out to be horribly wrong.
The overall gender gap actually narrowed in 2024, with just 53 percent of women choosing Harris and 45 percent favoring Trump. But focusing on gender alone obscures a bigger picture, a story that not only explains the most recent election, but the leftward drift of the Democratic Party generally, and possibly future electorates to come. While women overall moved towards Trump, his support among unmarried women fell from 46 percent in 2020 to just 38 percent in 2024. He was saved by winning married women, extending his lead among married men, and flipping unmarried men to his side, 49 to 47 percent.
By holding his ground among married women and adding to his lead among married men, Trump was able to expand his lead among all married voters from just seven points in 2020 to 13 points in 2024. Donald Trump is president thanks to the votes of married Americans. This was the marriage-gap election.
As strong as Trump was among married Americans, and despite his gains among unmarried men, the exit polls did contain some troubling news for the Republican Party. For the first time ever, unmarried women outnumbered married women at the polls. Not only are unmarried women the nation's fastest-growing voting demographic, they are also the only demographic moving further to the Left. Unless Trump does something to stop our nation's falling marriage rate, the Left-leaning politics of unmarried women will only grow in strength at the ballot box.
From the first census of the United States in 1790 through 1960, about 80 percent of households were led by a married couple. That percentage started falling in the 1960s. It dipped below 50 percent in 2010, and has fallen to near 45 percent today. Culture and technology are both culprits in the decline of marriage, but public policy is as well.
While the number of households receiving direct cash benefits through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program has waned, the percentage of working-class families that use other means-tested safety-net programs—like Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, Food Stamps, and Section 8 housing—has grown dramatically. All together, federal and state governments spend over $1 trillion a year on programs that punish marriage through means-testing. It is exactly among these families that marriage has declined the most. The federal government is perfectly capable of ending the marriage penalties built into its programs.
Another reason marriage rates have fallen among the working class is the relative decline in wages for non-college educated men. While wages for all American workers have risen since 1970, women and college-educated men have benefited the most. The bottom 10 percent of male earners saw their wages decline more than 7 percent. Since women tend to seek men who make as much or more than they do, this decline in low-skill male wages means fewer men will be considered marriage-eligible by working women who have seen their income rise.
The answer to this problem is obviously not lower pay or less work for women, but rather policies that boost the wages of lower-skilled male workers. Trump's efforts to secure the border and deport illegal immigrants will help do that. But even more can be achieved.
Trump needs to make America a country that builds again. That means working with Congress on real permitting reform, including a thorough rewrite of the National Environmental Policy Act, which adds costs, delays, and uncertainty to every infrastructure project in the country that requires federal-agency approval. More construction projects means more construction jobs and therefore higher pay for more men. More men with higher-paying jobs means more marriages. More marriages means more married women voting Republican and in turn fewer unmarried women voting for Democrats.
Partisan electoral advantage is not the primary reason Republicans should build an agenda around addressing the decline of marriage in the United States, however. Marriage is good in itself. It benefits not just husband and wife, not just the children of a stable marriage, but entire communities and ultimately the whole country.
To reverse rising income inequality, the disintegration of civil society, and falling birth rates—all issues rooted in the decline of marriage—we must change course on public policy. Fortunately, it appears Trump intends on doing exactly that.
Conn Carroll is commentary editor for Washington Examiner. He is the author of Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage is Destroying Democracy.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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