Girls Gone Riled: Will Single Women Break Bush's Heart?

Trend-conscious candidates beware: Do not get caught courting soccer moms or NASCAR dads. They’re so over. This year’s hot new swing voter is the single woman.

And with very good reason: Although single women account for one-fifth of the U.S. electorate, they historically turn out to vote in much smaller numbers than married women or, for that matter, married or single men.

The stats are simply stunning: According to Women’s Voices, Women Vote, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to engaging unmarried women in the electoral process, 22 million unmarried women didn’t vote in the last presidential election.
And what’s more, they are seriously ticked off: Over two-thirds of them believe that the country is moving in the wrong direction and want real change

Although it’s impossible to pigeonhole a group as diverse as single women there’s a reason they tend to have the political opinions they do: The vast majority of them find themselves living on the economic edge, radicalized by the struggle to provide for themselves, their children and their older parents, mostly on one income.

They occupy the front lines of the Other America. They know what it means to have a child in a failing school. They live the reality of being forced to use an ER as the family doctor because they can’t afford health insurance. They understand the feeling of being one paycheck away from poverty. To them the WalMartization of our economy is not a theoretical concept.

The issues single women are most concerned with — job security, affordable health care and decent educational opportunities for themselves and their children — also skew heavily in the Democrats’ favor. When you’re barely making ends meet, another round of tax cuts for millionaires doesn’t tend to be very high on your political must-have list. Neither is spending mega-billions fighting preemptive, ideological wars based on misleading premises — especially when, more often than not, it’s your loved ones coming home in body bags.

It can’t be helping Karl Rove sleep at night to know that single women are also more likely to support gun control, gay rights and, especially, abortion rights. Talk about your potential culture war blowback.

So if untold millions of single women voters are likely to reject Bush faster than a bucktoothed blind date with bad breath and a crummy car, why isn’t the Kerry campaign busy drawing up the guest list for its Inaugural Ball?

Because the trick is getting these progressive-minded women to turn up at the polls. More.: