While speaking in India, a woman who was never elected president, Hillary Clinton, whined about her White House-free fate, blaming married women for her electoral downfall. “We do not do well with white men and we don’t do well with married, white women,” Clinton stated. “And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”
Yes, according to Hillary, white women (not including Hillary) follow the paths laid down by their white husbands (not including Bill). Married white women only vote Republican because they’re afraid of Ol’ Bob comin’ home from the beer factory and grabbin’ his whoopin’ stick, a-whompin’ and a-wailin’ about that gull durned Hillary woman.
Or, perhaps, it turns out that married people generally vote differently than single people. That’s true for men as well as women. In 2016, for example, married people voted 52% for Donald Trump, and unmarried people voted 55% for Hillary Clinton. According to Hillary’s theory, nearly all that shift should have come from women, since they’re only voting for Republicans because their toxic men tell them to do so. But that’s not what the statistics show. Here are the stats: married men voted 57% for Trump and 38% for Hillary; unmarried men voted 46% for Hillary and 44% for Trump. So that means that men shifted 11 points in favor of Trump based on marital status. How about women? 49% of married women voted for Hillary, and 63% of unmarried women voted for Hillary. That’s a 14 point shift in favor of Trump from unmarried to married.
In other words, it isn’t about men controlling women. It’s about marriage changing people. There are probably a couple of reasons for that. First, married people tend to be older than unmarried people; second, those who choose to get married are a self-selected group who probably tend to be more conservative politically than those who don’t. But there’s also a basic truth here: marriage usually signifies a decision to take life more seriously, to begin a life together, to build something outside the scope of government and beyond your career. That requires more private space from government in which to raise your children; it requires more money free from the predations of the tax collector. Marriage changes people’s priorities. And that’s a good thing, even if Hillary Clinton can’t appreciate it, or wishes to disparage men as rubes who are bullying their wives into conformity.
