By Juliet Eilperin
Read the original article at The Washington Post.
Democratic consultants and activists have seen the future, and the future is single women. At least when it comes to the base vote for the 2008 presidential race.
In a lunch briefing yesterday hosted by the Center for American Progress, experts including pollster Stan Greenberg and Page Gardner, president of Women's Voices, Women Vote Action Fund argued that unmarried women rank as one of the Democratic Party's most reliable and important support groups.
With the number of unmarried, separated, divorced and widowed American women is equal to the number of married women, Gardner said, single women represent 26 percent of the eligible voting population and make up "the fastest-growing large demographic group in the country."
However, unlike Carrie Bradshaw and her friends on the now-defunct series "Sex and the City," these single women are more focused on issues such as ending the war in Iraq and better health-care access, according to Gardner: "These women are worried about paying the rent, not marrying Mr. Big."
Greenberg said this demographic amounts to "the Democrats' evangelicals," in part because evangelicals make up 23 percent of the eligible vote and are just as reliable in their support for the opposite party, the GOP.
"What happens to these two groups is going to be quite critical in this election," Greenberg said, noting that two-thirds of single women backed the Democrats in 2006.
