Trip Down the Aisle Tends to Lead Voters Into GOP, Times Poll Finds : Politics: Survey shows a philosophical gap between singles and couples. Experts point to differences in age, demographics, lifestyles.

Everyone has heard about the gender gap--the tendency of Democrats to run better among women than men. It’s having a modest impact on this presidential election: In the latest Times Poll, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton attracts 50% of women’s votes, compared to 45% of men’s.

But there is a more fundamental divide in the electorate in this year of family values, deadbeat dads and Murphy Brown. Call it the marriage gap.

Among married couples--who make up more than three-fifths of all adults in the country--Clinton leads President Bush by a gossamer 43%-39% margin, according to the Times Poll, which was conducted from Oct. 2 through Oct. 5. But among single voters--defined as all unmarried adults except widowed men and women--Clinton holds a decisive 56% to 25% advantage. Ross Perot attracts about one out of ten in both groups.

In other words, Clinton runs 13 percentage points better with singles than with married couples. That’s a gulf more than twice as large as the gender gap in the Times Poll.

It’s tempting to view this division as a result of the GOP’s polarizing stress on “family values” at the Republican Convention in August. To many listeners, the sharply-worded speeches from the podium appeared to express disapproval of anything other than two-parent families where the mother stays at home to tend the children.

That now-muted message “may have intensified” the voting gap between singles and married couples, said Fred Steeper, the Bush campaign’s pollster. But it clearly didn’t cause it because the marriage gap dates back well before this election and extends not only to preferences between Clinton and Bush but also to broad questions of political philosophy.

Over the past six presidential elections, married couples have voted for Republican presidential candidates at a rate about six to seven percentage points greater than singles, according to a compilation of National Opinion Research Center data by polling analyst Karlyn Keene of the American Enterprise Institute.

In the Times Poll, married voters were more likely than singles to identify as Republicans, and less likely to call themselves Democrats. Just 21% of married voters called themselves liberals, with 38% terming themselves moderates and 40% saying they are conservatives. Among singles, the share calling themselves moderates is about the same (36%), but otherwise the numbers reverse, with 37% calling themselves liberals and just 23% saying they are conservatives.

On many of the issues raised in this campaign, married voters take more conservative positions than singles, particularly on social issues.

In the last Times Poll, married voters split narrowly in favor of the Roe vs. Wade decision guaranteeing a woman’s legal right to an abortion; singles support the decision by almost 3 to 1. By a 49%-42% margin, married voters oppose allowing homosexuals to serve in the military; singles supported gay service, 60% to 34%.

On broader questions about the economy and government’s role in society, married and single voters also diverge. Single voters are more likely than married ones to support the environment over the economy when the two conflict and to say that government should work intimately with business to help create jobs.

Singles are also substantially more in favor of increasing government spending on domestic needs and are more supportive of proposals to require all employers to provide health insurance.

What explains these gaps? No one is entirely certain, but there are no shortage of hypotheses.

Most agree one factor is the demographic differences between married couples and singles. People who are married tend to be older and more affluent than those who are single; those traits are often associated with more conservative views. Blacks and Latinos, who lean Democratic, make up a higher percentage of singles than of married couples.

But these factors don’t explain the entire phenomenon. Within the same age, race or income group, single voters are still more likely to prefer Clinton than married ones.

Is there something in marriage itself that explains those differences, or are people who get married simply different than those who choose not to marry? M. Kent Jennings, a University of Michigan political scientist, argues that the answer is probably some of both.

Jennings, who has analyzed how voters change their political preferences as they age, says people who marry probably step onto the altar holding more conformist views about society than people who choose to remain single.

But, like many other analysts, he also believes that the lifestyle changes involved in marriage itself tend to strengthen such instincts.

Keene agrees: “Marriage, mortgages and children have traditionally been conservatizing influences,” she said.

Of those factors, the most important may be children. The Times Poll did not find a significant difference in the views of married couples with children in the household and those without. But other surveys have found such a divergence.

In a survey conducted for Reader’s Digest magazine earlier this year, GOP pollster Richard B. Wirthlin found married couples with children held much more conservative views on social issues than either married couples without children or singles. That survey, like many others, also found that married couples with children attend religious services more regularly than any other group.

To Steeper, such numbers are one key to the lock.

Because they are more likely than singles to serve (or prospectively serve) as parents for young children, married couples tend to be more responsive to the longstanding GOP messages about “traditional values” and more leery of Democratic tolerance for “non-traditional values” such as homosexual rights, Steeper says.

If such cultural factors pull married voters toward the Republican Party, economic concerns tend to push single voters toward the Democrats, some analysts say. Married and single voters offered similar assessments of the economy’s health in the last Times Poll. But singles--who must rely on only one income--may see themselves as more vulnerable to the economy’s swings than married couples, some pollsters say.

“For singles, it is not related just to the reality of their economic situation--it’s related to the perception of economic risk in their situation,” said GOP pollster Bill McInturff.

That sense of precariousness, McInturff contends, makes single voters more receptive to calls for government action to cushion the risks of the business cycle--the traditional Democratic argument.

This year, though, many married couples are just as nervous about the economy, and equally open to Democratic arguments.

Though more concerned than singles about social issues, married voters also focus primarily on the economy: In the last Times Poll, half of all married voters said economic strain was the principal threat to American families. Just 30% cited moral decline. And while married voters are more partial to Bush than singles, the bottom line is that the President still trails among such couples--a group the GOP has dominated for years.