"Sex and the City" Voters?

I noticed it's actually been ten days since I've posted anything -- which is bad, even for me. I've got a couple longer items coming, maybe later today, that have been underway all week. Real life -- taxes, a board meeting at the foundation, etc. -- got in the way last week, but has been wrestled to the ground. Meanwhile, a few quick posts on things that have caught my attention: This article in Salon turns satirical at the end, but it mostly seems to be a serious analysis of the potential of never-married women as a Democratic voting bloc in the election.

The author proclaims, "I am this demographic" and interviews her friends over cocktails about why they don't always vote. And, like other analysts, she adopts the term "'Sex and the City' Voter" to describe these unmarried women, calling it a demographic that marketers understand but politicians don't. This term is the most misleading phony-demographic since "NASCAR Dads," for a very simple reason: The median income of never-married women 18-64 is $15,872. And that's not $15,000 as in, an editorial assistant at a publishing house living with three roommates in a one-bedroom apartment in the West 80s, accumulating zany dating stories that they'll all laugh about in five years. That's $15,000 as in working two jobs that pay $6.50 an hour and driving a ten-year-old car.

I never watched much of "Sex and the City" because we don't have HBO, but I recall one episode where Carrie figured out how much she spent on shoes, and I believe it was that very same $15,000. This is the lowest median income, by far, of any group except widows, who are presumably more likely to be out of the workforce. It does not get much higher if one excludes never-married women who aren't working ($18,000 median for working women alone).

Elsewhere in the Salon article, the author quotes the editor of Elle, who says that never-married women's non-voting is explained by the fact that, "Once you have children, you are invested in the community more, and you feel more of a personal impact about the way your government behaves." Hello? Maybe you can all put down your martinis long enough to notice that almost one-quarter of never-married women have at least one child. So now add child-care and the time demands of children into that $15,000.

The article veers into satire when the author interviews Simon Doonan, the window-decorator and New York Observer columnist, and now-married sex columnist Amy Sohn who proffer various advice about hunky running-mates and "cute and witty female-toned media campaigns." But there's no mystery to why never-married women vote in such low numbers, and it has little to do with being single and not that much to do with being female, certainly not in the "women are from Venus" sense put forward here. The characteristics of people who don't vote are, first, low income. People with income below $15,000 voted at a rate of less than 35% in 2000, compared to 58% for the population as a whole. And, second,age. Thirty-two percent of 18-24 year-olds voted in 2000, and 43% of 25-34 year-olds. These factors are much more important than race or other factors in determining voting. And although women in general vote at a higher rate than men, the demographic of never-married women are simply where low income and youth meet.

If the Democrats want to increase the number of never-married women who vote this November -- and they should, because they don't like Bush -- the answer is simple: It involves a strong economic message. It requires showing some reason to believe that people who work hard can hope to earn enough to support themselves and a family, have reliable health care, and build some economic security. On one level, the message should be directed to women's particular economic situation: pay equity, child-care, work-family balance and health care. But on another level, it is the very same economic message that married women and men want to hear. Democrats need to avoid getting distracted by artificial demographic categories, especially when they are so distorted by the New York media view of the world.

Comments

[Neil Sinhababu]

Welcome back! We missed you.

[IOZ]

In fact, the Carrie Bradshaw lifetime budgetary line-item for "Shoe Expenses" was $40,000 (100 pairs x $400/per). When Carrie did the multiplyin' she forgot a zero--this was the joke. $4,000 isn't so bad, she says (I'm paraphrasing). Forty, Miranda deadpans.

This just serves to emphasize the lunacy of this fictional demographic. $40,000/year is nearly the median American HOUSEHOLD income.

Salon. Preposterous.

[praktike]

Well effing said.

[MDtoMN]

I like your analysis, and I was thinking something similar myself. While I know that we need a strong economic message thate appeals to all Americans, I wonder if the Democratic Party has focused too much on the High Turn out, married, established, middle class. Obviously you need to court them and the old, but I think you really could turn out and capture a lot more of the youth, poor, minority and single woman vote if you simply spoke to their issues more. I was a college student only 3 years ago, and I was fascinated by politics. However, I remember listening to every politician and making the decision as though I were some future, married, established me, simply because none of them were addressing my problems at the moment - tuition costs, rent costs, health care needs in the summer, etc.

[aRuss]

JUST SO WE DON'T FORGET:

Fourteen years ago U.S. Ambassador April Gilespie was talking with Sadam Hussein and he told her:

"You can come to Iraq with aircraft and missiles, but do not push us to the point where we cease to care. And when we feel that you want to injure our pride and take away the Iraqis' chance of a high standard of living, then we will cease to care and death will be the choice for us. Then we would not care if you fired 100 missiles for each missile we fired. Because without pride life would have no value." http://wanniski.com/PrintPage.asp?TextID=3182

Unfortunately our troops were forced into their country without cause. They have stolen the Iraqis' pride and must now fight to find their way out. How sad.

[R Wells]

Decembrist: Katha Pollitt echoes the point, in the Nation a week or so back. While she stresses that the "single woman" does not represent "a coherent demographic," there are nonetheless some basic things a democratic campaign could cohere around. As single women are "disproportionately young, mobile, struggling and/or very, very poor," they could perhaps be mobilized around the issues you mention--child care, pay equity, health care, education. But this, Pollitt then writes, is also the main difficulty:

The trouble with going after single women, those fans of progressive change, is that one has to offer them something progressive. Pay equity, for example, comes in at the top of polls of women's concerns--yet in the primary debates, Carol Moseley Braun was the only candidate who made an issue of it. Or take healthcare: Why doesn't Kerry's plan cover all of the 44 million Americans--disproportionately female Americans, by the way--now without health insurance? Education? Do the Dems really talk about fixing the public schools in ways that would affect single mothers? Tom Geoghegan, Mark Dudzik and Adolph Reed have all suggested in these pages that the Democrats mobilize young voters by proposing to make college free. It's a great idea, but nobody picked up on it. One could easily come up with similar lures for the votes of single women--a federal living wage, universal public preschool and after-school (don't forget, singles with kids don't have the luxury of staying home with them), heck, free birth control. It will be interesting to see if the Democratic campaign to sign up these voters involves offering them things they want or just telling them that they want what's on offer.

At the risk of appearing stuck in the lefty echo chamber, I'd also note that William Greider has added to the doubt in the most recent Nation. The economic policy team Kerry has assembled seems (thus far) more inclined towards the bond market and other center-right DLC niceties, than with taking a chance on what--in theory anyway--is a critical component of its own base.

[4rentinla]

I liked "Sex and the City" very. There a lot of truth about our life. Those girls are unbelievable and unique.