POLITICO: Stumbling into the ‘marriage gap’

POLITICO profiles WVWVAF founder and president Page Gardner:

One afternoon following the muddled 2000 presidential election, Page Gardner sat in her basement home office, poring over the returns and hunting for clues in who voted for whom, and why.

The one pattern that she kept seeing — and couldn’t let go of — could prove pivotal 14 years later in this fall’s midterm elections.

In that drawn-out White House battle in 2000, married women chose the Republican, George W. Bush — but single women, while less likely to vote, broke for Democrat Al Gore, who earned more than 60 percent of their vote. The “marriage gap” — the difference in the party preferences of married and unmarried women — so fascinated Gardner that she made it her mission to understand and explain it, ultimately setting up two nonpartisan organizations devoted primarily to that subject.

As Democrats wade into midterms with an unpopular president, persisting economic anxieties and historical trends stacked squarely against them, they are bracing for turnout trouble. But they hope to take advantage of the marriage gap by ramping up turnout among progressive-leaning single women, a group they see as a potential silver bullet in key races across the country.

So Gardner, who is widely considered the top expert on the marriage gap, has become something of an oracle for the Democrats’ 2014 strategy.

Read the whole story by Katie Glueck at Politico.com.