That’s out of more than 60 million married couples in the US. Barely here equals about half?
Well, first, married women are not evenly divided. They are more Republican and less Democratic than unmarried men, who are also Republican.
Second, even by the numbers you cite, Democrats aren't coming close to half of the vote among married couples.
Third, you have over 11% of the vote going to third parties. In reality, in 2016 the two-party vote share was just over 94%.
Some of these problems seem to arise from you confusing party affiliation with voting. They're different.
Unmarried women vote Democratic, 68-31.
Unmarried men vote Republican, 52-45.
Married women, Republican, 56-42.
Married men, Republican, 59-39.
Here's an image purporting to describe the Reuters-Ipsos poll of 2012: https://i.imgur.com/I3ycNpC.png . (I haven't been able to find the actual poll.) It only gives the Republican share of the vote for each demographic, but Republicans+Democrats should be close to 100% of the vote. 1992 is an exception.
Unmarried women, 31% Republican.
Unmarried men, 41% Republican.
Married women, 55% Republican.
Married men, 58% Republican.
Anyhow, the quoted figures doesn’t exactly show that married people “barely vote Republican”.
Not to mention that a large part of the relative under representation of married people in the Democratic voter base is due to relative over representation of younger people.
Not to mention, according to him, 40% is "barely".
This theory that institutions kind of have a tendency to perpetuate the conditions that necessitate their existence was developed by Durkheim, and like most of the other early sociologists, I really recommend it over newer stuff. It's not conspiratorial, the idea is that organizations that do this outsurvive groups that legitimately solve the problems they are created to solve, and so through an evolutionary process, the longest lived and deepest institutions tend to be ones with behaviors ironically antithetical to their supposed mission (even if the members of the institution totally believe in and earnestly support the mission).
The typical example (at least when I was into this kind of stuff) is the Catholic Church earnestly helping the poor, but doing so in a way that societaly, will never actually alleviate poverty, or may even exacerbate it. Now days I tend to hear this line of thinking used about liberals supporting policies that "help" minorities but really perpetuate the cycle of poverty.
Whether you believe this is beside the point, I only mean to suggest that OP is wrong, but a steelman of his point is deeper than it seems, and deserves our good faith imo.
Arguably by the same reasoning, republicans benefit from legal abortion and their finally getting Roe v Wade reversed was terrible for their electoral performance.
You aborted your analysis too early. Getting Roe v. Wade overturned still benefits Republicans until such time as Legislation is successfully passed to outlaw abortion at all levels (i.e. State & Federal, though arguably we're talking Republican here, so one would think they'd content themselves with States). Only then would the "problem" be solved.
>Arguably by the same reasoning, republicans benefit from legal abortion and their finally getting Roe v Wade reversed was terrible for their electoral performance.
Indeed, the far-right has raised exactly this criticism of overturning Roe v Wade:
>If you have limited energy and a limited number of possible wins, it is important to focus your limited energy on one kind of win: wins that make future wins easier. By definition, these are the kinds of wins that augment your power. These are real wins. > >There is another kind of “win,” wins which expend your power in order to achieve some result you want. These are sometimes called “Pyrrhic victories.” Pyrrhus took the battlefield, but after the battle his chances of winning were reduced. His tactical “victory” was a strategic defeat.
Source: You can only lose the culture war (https://graymirror.substack.com/p/you-can-only-lose-the-cult...)
This kind of thinking isn't partisan, I think it describes the a problem that occurs with institutions in any society. I'm not sure what the solution is, other than to be collectively vigilant against institutions succumbing to these tendencies. Which seems woefully inadequate.
I was suggesting that there are other things that go into even the age issue.
Religious people are more likely to marry than non-religious people. Religious people tend to vote more conservatively than non-religious people. Etc. etc. I was agreeing with pfisch that a lot of the reasons people get married often line up with reasons why people vote Republican.
And I wouldn't say the Catholic Church believes its mission to be to eliminate poverty. Or even alleviate it. They want to temporarily alleviate the superficial effects of poverty on people.
You might want to think about what a 20-point margin means in electoral politics. Taking 60% of the vote is routinely described in terms like "landslide victory".