Want to Win Elections? Talk to Me - I'm Single
I'm single. Always have been. I'm also an educated and informed participant in the political process. Even when all of the candidate choices are dismal, I still show up at the polls and cast my ballot for the least disappointing person. But millions of other single people do not seem to share my enthusiasm.
To many progressives, it is exasperating, frustrating, and bewildering that so many single people are with them on the issues but just don't vote. I think there are lots of reasons for this, and I've written about some of them during the 2004 campaign and in my new book, Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. Here, I want to take you through a brief tour of some of this season's political outreach, narrated from the point of view of someone who is single. I hope you will start to see how even those candidates and groups whose positions I (mostly) favor and respect do not seem to have much respect or concern for me.
Here's what I hope is appealing about the suggestions I will make today: The interested candidates need to invest no extra time or money to implement them. All they need to do is rewrite their campaign materials so as to include all of their constituents, not just the married ones. (Oh, and when they claim to value human values and not just "family values," they should mean it.)
Exhibit #1. In a recent e-mail, Patty Wetterling let me know that Minnesota firefighters, police, and nurses stood at her side at the state Capitol. She promised to continue to "fight to keep children and families safe." Did she really mean to imply that she was concerned with the safety of all of her constituents, as long as they were not single people without children? Why not pledge to work for the safety of every single person in her district? (Double meaning intended.)
Exhibit #2 (a collection that just keeps growing). Earlier in the year, Bob Menendez posted a blog on Give 'Em Hell Harry in which he proclaimed that he was "Standing Up for Working Families." At the website of the Democratic Party, I learn that the "Bush Economy Fails Working Families." Over at the home page of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, I find the "2006 Fight for Working Families Headquarters." Why don't we all declare our support for workers instead of "working families"? The trite byte isn't even sensible; employers don't hire working families, they hire workers.
Exhibit #3. Consider, too, the deeply shameful television ad designed to smear Harold Ford. Watching the scantily clad white woman wiggle and wink as she asked the black candidate to come hither was excruciating. But something else alienated me, too - the implication elsewhere in the ad that the only candidates worth supporting are those who are devoted to the elimination of the so-called "marriage penalty." The mantra-like pledges to relieve married people of their burdens, without any comparable concern for single people, would be off-putting even if the "penalty" really did fall disproportionately on married people. It doesn't.
Exhibit #4. Here's another e-mail I got. It seems to be from the Phil Angelides campaign, but the sender is not Phil but Julie. It begins, "Dear Bella, I have been married to Phil Angelides for 24 years." So the message seems to be, "Vote for Phil Angelides; his wife thinks he's great." Or maybe it is even simpler: "Vote for Phil Angelides; he's married."
I understand the temptation to reach for the images of the sturdy "working families" or the warm and fuzzy loving wives. Married people are the low-hanging fruit. They vote more often, and that tastes good now. But is this a wise long-term plan for a party that wants to sustain itself for decades to come?
Maybe candidates and parties figure that since most people eventually do marry, their appeals to marriage and traditional family will reach single people once they have become unsingle. Or maybe they believe that most single people want nothing more than to be married, and so singles will identify with the matrimaniacal messages on the basis of their longing.
Wrong.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project surveyed thousands of American adults late last year (2005). They found that the biggest group of single people, 55 percent, said that they were not in a committed relationship and that they were not looking for a partner. And while it is true that most Americans do try marriage at some point in their lives, there is another statistic that I find even more compelling. On the average, Americans now spend more of their adult years unmarried than married. It is now marriage that is the transitional stage - connecting one singlehood to the next - and it is transitional only for those people who do marry.
The rising tide of single people has been building for decades, and it has not yet crested. The current mid-term campaign will be over in days, but the importance of people who are single to politics and to our nation will long endure.