In the United States, single women are pariahs, with a social status slightly lower than that of convicted child molesters and slightly higher than that of politicians.
As it turns out, though, they could be a significant voting bloc, and the political parties finally may be taking notice.
Single women are a gigantic constituency – “never-married, divorced or widowed women constitute a whopping 20 percent of the electorate and 42 percent of all registered women voters. In the 2000 elections, they represented the same percentage of the electorate as Jews, blacks, and Latinos combined”.
The problem is that single women don’t vote, because politicians fail to address their concerns. Lakshmi Chaudhry’s AlterNet article speculates that this could have cost Al Gore the election.
Politicians have been afraid to openly court the votes of single people for fear of appearing anti-family values (whatever that means). Let’s see if this round of presidential debates and campaign ads corrects this oversight.