How Marriages and Mortgages Influence Election Outcomes
1st July 2017
One curious aspect of American political geography is that variables that predict partisanship at the individual level often do a poor job of predicting the partisan balance at the state level. African Americans are among the most reliable Democratic voters, but the region with the largest African American population (the Deep South) is reliably Republican; wealthy Americans are, on average, more likely to vote Republican, yet the Northeast, where so much of the nation’s wealth is concentrated, consistently gives its Electoral College votes to Democrats. This pattern makes it difficult to find variables that accurately predict whether a state falls in the Red or Blue camp. One of the few such variables is the median age at first marriage.
,,,
One such variable, which government policy can influence, is home affordability. To my knowledge, the blogger Steve Sailer was the first person to make the connection between home values, marriage rates, and vote choice. However, the existing scholarly literature supported this hypothesis.