The marriage gap: when will the Democrats wake up?

Looking back over the results of the presidential election, pundits now agree that the war over terror, not the war over "moral values," led to John Kerry's defeat. Still, that doesn't mean that values are off the political agenda. As the Democrats look ahead to the congressional elections of 2006, they will again confront one of the more troubling aspects of the "values" divide: the growing marriage gap. In 2000, married voters favored George W. Bush by a margin of 9 points over Al Gore (53-44). In 2004, they boosted his winning margin to 15 points over Kerry (57-42). Married parents with children under the age of eighteen gave Bush a whopping 19-point advantage over his Democratic opponent.

It is not hard to understand why the marriage gap widened in 2004. John Kerry seemed utterly unaware of the concerns of married parents with small children. In today's culture, parents face two increasingly countercultural tasks: holding together a marriage and protecting their kids from the siren songs of both media and marketplace. Yet Kerry did not have a single message that resonated with married parents. He opposed the right to parental notification for minors' abortions, condoned partial-birth abortion, and said not a single word about television's graphic depictions of sex, violence, murder, and mutilated corpses. Unlike Bill Clinton, who made a point of identifying with parental protests against Sister Souljah's violent lyrics and later campaigned for V-chips and school uniforms, Kerry missed similar opportunities to criticize such examples of celebrity sleaze as Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, Britney Spears's nanosecond marriage, or Whoopi Goldberg's obscene jokes. Instead, he tried to make an issue of Mary Cheney's lesbianism, a tactic that aroused the protective instincts of mothers everywhere. (A mother can speak publicly about her kid, but don't you dare!) He rarely mentioned children or the challenges of shaping kids' character and conduct in a culture where the messages sent by the market and popular entertainment aggressively undermine parental authority and guidance.

But the Democrats' marriage-gap problem goes beyond the missed opportunities of the Kerry campaign. The party that used to represent the concerns of the aspiring middle class, and especially married parents with young children, is now culturally alienated from them. While clinging to rhetoric that supposedly addresses the concerns of working families, Democrats have gravitated toward the libertarian values of the urban singles culture. Many party leaders simply seem not to understand, much less identify with, the values of married parents who live in the new, less-expensive exurbs, shop at Wal-Mart and Home Depot, work in commission sales, read Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life, put religious bumper-stickers on their cars, and struggle to "work on their marriage" while keeping their kids away from sex, drugs, and alcohol, as well as the lesser lures of body piercings, tattoos, gangsta clothes, and other pop fashion. That such people turn to God, to prayer, and to their religious communities for help and strength, rather than to the programs of the welfare state, is puzzling to many Democrats. That such people often feel that Hollywood poses a greater threat than Halliburton is bewildering. That such people believe that moral and religious values may have a higher priority than their own economic self-interest is almost beyond comprehension.

Perhaps most revealing of the party's cultural alienation is its response to private and public efforts to strengthen the institution of marriage itself. In his first term, Bush proposed spending $1.5 billion for projects to strengthen marriage as part of the reauthorization of welfare reform. In the meantime, while the bill remained bogged down in Congress, the administration took steps to fund research and pilot projects designed to encourage marriage among low-income couples. Shrewdly, it awarded virtually all the large research grants to highly regarded organizations like the Urban Institute and Mathematica, thereby avoiding any criticism or appearance of conservative bias. The Bush initiatives, in turn, energized grass-roots activists in communities and churches, including Catholic laypeople in marriage ministries, to think in new ways about how to reach low-income couples, especially those who are first-time parents and still romantically involved at the time of their child's birth. It also inspired new programs and activities for middle-class singles and couples who are preparing for marriage or entering a second marriage. African Americans began their own grass-roots marriage movement. Academics began to do research on marriage after a decades-long drought.

All of this activism on behalf of marriage might have inspired the Democratic leaders and left-leaning pundits to take a look and even to encourage some of these efforts. Instead, they avoided or dismissed them. Nearly every liberal columnist and editorialist in the country sneered at the Bush administration's marriage promotion initiatives, accusing the Republicans of a cynical ploy to replace jobs with marriage and attacking grass-roots activists as members of the Religious Right. Once again, the Democrats set themselves at cultural odds with the vast majority of Americans, especially Hispanics and also, increasingly, African Americans, who believe in marriage, want it for themselves and their children, and are worried about the high rates of divorce. By the time the gay-marriage issue rolled around, the Democrats had painted themselves into an awkward corner: since they refused to talk about so-called traditional marriage, Kerry's professed belief in marriage as "between a man and a woman" simply lacked any conviction or credibility. As a result, many voters suspected that Kerry was actually for gay marriage but unwilling to say so.

The widening marriage gap is a potent reminder of the salience of cultural issues for married parents. Whether the Democrats can win back some of these "average" working folk will depend on how willing they are to understand and represent the cultural, as well as the economic, challenges of rearing PG kids in an X-rated world.

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead is co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers and author of The Divorce Culture: Rethinking Our Commitments to Marriage and Family (Vintage, 1998).