Beyond the surface of 2024 voting data
If Republicans make significant inroads with single women, that will cause a seismic political shift.
A common meme about the 2024 election is that college educated voters preferred Vice President Kamala Harris to President Donald Trump by a wide margin. Trump supporters tout this as Trump's support for the working class, while Democrats claim that Republicans are stupid and uneducated. But regardless of how you analyze voter trends in 2024, the big problem with the meme is that it is not true.
College educated women went overwhelmingly for Harris. College educated men were evenly split between Harris and Trump, with Harris only gaining a 1% margin. Given how Harris won the Black and Hispanic votes, it is likely that college educated White men broke for Trump.
Digging deeper into the numbers is interesting too. When you break the women's vote down by single and married women, married women still voted Republican by a small margin. Married White women broke for Trump by higher numbers. Single women skewed the overall statistics for women voters by going overwhelmingly Democratic. It is not that Harris won women or college educated voters, she won college educated single women by such a large margin that it distorted the overall statistics by sex.
We do not have a gender gap of men and women. We have a gap of men without a college degree going for Trump while single women (with or without a college degree, but especially the college educated) went for Harris. It is much more complicated than a men vs. women sex gap.
Here is the big opportunity for Republicans: If single women (especially single women with a college degree) start moving toward Republicans, that will mark a seismic political shift. Republicans do not even need to outright win single women. They need to reduce their margin of loss. The biggest opportunity here is with a law and order platform, as single women tend to be more vulnerable to crime (especially violent crime) than married women. There are other ways to peel single women away from Democrats, but that is the most obvious.
Expect Democrats to quadruple down on "reproductive freedom," but that may only take them so far. Republicans can offer a broader agenda to peel away single women. The most important thing is to avoid mocking and ridiculing single women, which was common with the "very online" Right after the disappointing 2022 election. Republicans should not make the same mistake with single women that Hillary Clinton did with her "basket of deplorables" moment in 2016.
