The popular vote is likely to favour the Republicans, who performed well in gubernatorial contests. Working-class Americans, Hispanics, Asians and African-Americans continued their journey of political migration from Democrats to Republicans.
Single women, however, and young women in particular, stuck solidly with the Democrats, most notably in the cities and in more progressive states. Their support arguably kept the Democrats from losing the Senate and came close to saving the House of Representatives.
For Liberals in Australia, the rise of single 20 and 30-somethings is one of the most disturbing trends to emerge from last year’s census. For the first time, women under 35 are more likely to be single than not. The 45 per cent of them who are living with a partner are 20 per cent less likely to be formally married than they would have been a decade ago.
The good news for Labor and the Greens is that 220,000 more single women under 35 were eligible to vote in May than in 2010. They were more likely to vote Green than Liberal, and more likely still if they were single.
Home-owning partnered households are a solid feature of the Coalition’s support base. Politics, however, is a secondary concern for the party of Robert Menzies, whose vision of a dynamic and prosperous middle class was built on the notion of stable, coupled families living in a home of their own.
The deferral of family formation is a portent of social, economic, fiscal and demographic challenges ahead: the continuing decline of the nuclear family that began in the late 1960s as a social experiment, the results of which are only now emerging. The human cost and the policy challenges are immense.
Research in the US by the Pew Research Centre shows that life for a single woman isn’t as liberating as it appears in the average Hollywood rom-com.
Single women are less likely to have completed a bachelor’s degree. While they are marginally more likely to be employed, they earn 20 per cent less on average than partnered women. A quarter of them live with their parents and 32 per cent have one or more children.
Young women may be more ideologically drawn to the left than those older and wiser to the ways of the world, particularly those who had the dubious fortune of attending university.
However, the Pew research suggests that economic interests provide an even stronger explanation for why single women are inclined to vote Democrat.
Single women, particularly single mothers, have a vested interest in state intervention. A generation ago they could have expected a breadwinner to support them. Today, that breadwinner is the government to all intents and purposes, an ever-reliable partner with deep pockets to top up their meagre income.
It is not an accident that support for the Democrats in exit polls is highest among the poor with an annual income under $25,000 (50 per cent). It may be more surprising that the second strongest Democrat-leaning income group is the rich earning $100,000 or more (48 per cent).
Like Labor in Australia and Labour in Britain, the Democrats have abandoned the working class for the welfare and professional classes. This strange alliance in modern social democrat parties determines their agenda of woke and welfare.
The striving, independent middle class that Menzies identified still thrives. Coupled families today are more likely to enjoy the benefits of two incomes and each partner is likely to be on a higher wage than those who live alone. Not only does this make it easier for them to enter the housing market but it also has pushed house prices further from the reach of the singles.
Home ownership was the foundation stone of Menzies’ vision for post-war Australia outlined in his 1942 Forgotten People address in which the word home appears no fewer than 21 times.
He speaks of the home as “the foundation of sanity and sobriety” that “determines the health of society as a whole”. The act of saving for one’s own home is a “concrete expression of the habits of frugality and saving”.
Arguably, his greatest achievement in government was to increase the proportion of Australians owning or buying their own homes from 50 per cent to 70 per cent in just 16 years.
Yet joining that contented band that enjoys the dignity and independence of owning their own home is harder for those entering adulthood today than for any generation since the 1940s.
Despite the frequent ideological attacks on the nuclear family in the past 40 years, there is little if any evidence that it has changed the instincts of many young Australians to form a settled relationship and buy a little piece of dirt to call their own. It’s just that governments have made it harder. All it requires is a government smart enough to recognise the benefits of home ownership and calibrate its policies accordingly.
Land release, transaction taxes and red and green tape must be adjusted to allow housing construction to keep pace with population growth, as it did during much of the Howard period. The burden of compulsory superannuation must be lowered for the under-35s while over-55s should be given more incentive to top up their accounts.
Governments must address the promiscuous access to higher education and encourage more young adults to get into the workforce earlier or learn a useful trade.
The personal fulfilment and community stability derived from family formation should be reward enough for a Liberal government that chooses to take this path. The certainty that coupled homeowners are more likely to vote for the Coalition is merely the icing on the cake.
Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.
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