Father’s Day, ‘traditional families’ and the 2008 campaign
Dante Chinni
Posted: 06.13.2008 / 8:12 AM EDT
On Sunday, dads around the country will sneak off to the golf course or the ballgame and receive countless cards, ties, and pencil holders from their children. Sunday is Father’s Day.
The holiday got us at Patchwork Nation thinking: What exactly do families look like in the 11 community types? Where does the “traditional family” have its strongest base and where are the new concepts of “family” taking root?
These are not inconsequential questions as Barack Obama and John McCain campaign. Family composition has played a large role in American politics, particularly in discussions of poverty and culture since the 1960s.
In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a Labor Department official, decried single-parent (usually a mother) households as a cause of poverty, particularly among African-Americans in a report that shook up Washington. Many viewed the report as racist.
Nearly 30 years later, Vice President Dan Quayle attacked fictional single mom Murphy Brown and the entertainment industry treating single motherhood as “just another ‘lifestyle choice.’ ” The story became a running theme in George H.W. Bush’s 1992 campaign and sparked a national conversation about the cultural divide: On one side stood those who had no problem with Murphy Brown’s choices and on the other stood those who championed “traditional families.”
Some lines drawn in the culture-war battle are still evident when looking at the statistics of single mothers who have children under 18.
The two community types with the largest numbers of such households are full of reliably Democratic voters. More than 13 percent of the households in the nation’s big cities (“Industrial Metropolis” counties) have single mothers with minor children living at home. That’s also true of 14 percent of the households in the largely African-American communities (“Minority Central”).
And at the other end of the spectrum, the community types with the lowest numbers of single moms with minors at home are solidly Republican. Only 7.9 percent of the households in counties with older populations (“Emptying Nests”) are headed by single mothers with young children. And just 8.3 percent of the homes in rural farm counties (“Tractor Country”) fit into that mold.
So case closed, right? Communities with more “traditional” families tend to vote Republican, while those with single moms lean Democratic.
Not exactly. Other issues come into play, too.
For instance, the nation’s wealthy suburbs (“Monied ’Burbs”) look very similar to communities with a high number of evangelical Christians (our “Evangelical Epicenters”) based on the percentage that have traditional families. A little more than 8 percent of the households in the “Monied ’Burbs” and the “Evangelical Epicenters” are headed by single moms with young children.
But in terms of their votes, these communities look different. The evangelical communities vote heavily Republican, while the wealthy burbs are nearly split and lean Democratic.
But explaining such voting patterns is what Patchwork Nation was designed to do.
After all, these communities are influenced by much more than their family composition. Differences in a community’s average income, occupation, dominant religion, and its proximity to other kinds of places all play roles in how residents see the world.
So just because people don’t live like Murphy Brown doesn’t mean they dislike Murphy Brown. Or viewed through the prism of Father’s Day, you can’t tell how a community will vote in the fall by the number of tee times scheduled for Sunday.
