Free Republic

As the divorce rate plummets at the top of American society and rises at the bottom, the widening “marriage gap” is breeding inequality. There is a widening gulf between how the best- and least-educated Americans approach marriage and child-rearing. Among the elite (excluding film stars), the nuclear family is holding up quite well. Only 4% of the children of mothers with college degrees are born out of wedlock. And the divorce rate among college-educated women has plummeted. Of those who first tied the knot between 1975 and 1979, 29% were divorced within ten years. Among those who first married between...

Oct. 22, 2004-- The gender gap just might be passé. This year's electorate currently is divided more along marital lines than gender lines, a contrast from the last presidential election. Men support George W. Bush over John Kerry by an eight-point margin in the latest ABC News tracking poll, while women are split between the candidates. In 2000 there was a bigger difference between the sexes: Bush +11 among men, Al Gore +11 among women. Polls are not predictive and the final breakdown remains to be seen. But as of now, marital status tells more of a story. Married voters —...

It may sound like the start of a bad joke, but the fact is most married women say they'll vote for President Bush. By nearly 2-to-1, unmarried women say they support John Kerry. The "marriage gap" -- the difference in the vote between married and unmarried women -- is an astonishing 38 percentage points, according to aggregated USA Today/CNN/Gallup Polls. In contrast, the famous "gender gap," the difference in the vote between men and women, is just 11 points.

WASHINGTON -- As postwar problems in Iraq leave a coat of doubt on George W. Bush's re-election, other early indicators of the 2004 election are also taking shape. They include a continued divide between voters based on their marital status, and emerging age and gender gaps among Hispanics. It's uncertain how much the lack of weapons of mass destruction will corrode Bush's re-election chances. The news recently focused more on whether Bush used bogus intelligence to justify the war than on the postwar search for WMD. As a result, polls have shown diminished optimism over Iraq, with the Pew Research...