How to Manufacture (D) Voters

Glenn Reynolds has a piece that looks at neuroses and how they are very useful to Democrat politicians.  But first, on voting patterns:  It's not "suburban housewives" who carry Democrat pols to victory.

It's unmarried women, with or without children.

Barone:

...As American Enterprise Institute’s ace polling expert Karlyn Bowman together with Ruy Teixeira have pointed out, it’s more of a marriage gap.

The exit poll in the almost even 2022 House (Republicans won the popular vote 50% to 47%) shows that married men voted 59% to 39% Republican, and unmarried men also went Republican by a smaller but significant 52% to 45% margin.

Married women, however, also voted Republican by a landslide 56% to 42% margin. So, why was the election so close? Because unmarried women favored Democrats 68% to 31%....

This was mentioned in a column which looked at "neuroses."  That's not a co-incidence.  With some exceptions, the never-married or divorced females are neurotic.  Defined?

...irrational behavior, based on irrational feelings and obsessions rather than reality....

Go ahead.  Run through your Rolodex.  See what  you come up with.......... 

Even worse (Barone, again)

In general, women are more risk-averse than men, and thus more supportive of welfare state measures and more reluctant to support military action. They are also, as we have seen on female-dominated campuses, more willing to suppress speech that is seen as irritating or hurtful. “Highly educated women,” as Australian educator Lorenzo Warby writes, “are proving all too willing to trash other people’s freedoms to protect their emotions.”

He continues:

Surveys show that, after 50 years of feminism, American women are increasingly likely to report themselves as unhappy, a characteristic especially marked in unmarried young liberal women with no religious connection....

Don't read that as 'religious women are just fine and dandy.'  Proportionately better, yes.  Uniformly?  Nope.  If you haven't met the neurotic women who show up in church regularly, you're not meeting too many folks at church.

Glenn Reynolds migrates to the political realm and has a not-surprising conclusion.

 ...Reading all of these pieces I’m seeing a story that goes something like this:  Depressed, neurotic people (especially single women) are more likely to support Democrats.  Democrats support policies and messaging that produce more depressed, neurotic people, especially single women....

 ...Now maybe this is an accident, but maybe it isn’t.  Enter the “Curley Effect.”  As this Harvard paper notes, “James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston, used wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston, thereby shaping the electorate in his favor.  As a consequence, Boston stagnated, but Curley kept winning elections. . . .  We call this strategy—increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies—the Curley effect. But it is hardly unique to Curley.”

Making the populace (especially women) more fearful, depressed, and neurotic is undoubtedly bad for societal wealth and happiness.  But does it yield votes for Democrats?  Clearly yes.  Are they doing it on purpose?...

Well, ARE they?  

Tucker Carlson says the same thing in different words: 

 "The ruling party is the party of the childless, the unmarried, the people working for low wages for large corporations and living in tiny apartments in overcrowded cities that are rife with crime." 

 "Who votes for the people who run the United States right now? People who are working for big banks, living in crowded conditions, very often alone, in big soulless cities, having their food delivered by immigrants, and spending their time glued to a screen. What does that sound like to you? It sounds like prison, actually." 

 "Who are the people who oppose this? Where do they live and how do they live? Well, they are poorer generally on paper. But are their lives worse if you live in a place where you can see the sky? Where you can make your own food? If you can go outside and identify three species of trees or hear birds, or experience silence, the rarest commodity in the modern world. Those are the people who are not with the program. People who have a daily experience of nature. And those people are much more likely to acknowledge a power beyond themselves and their government. And there's a reason for that because they can see it.

 When you're living crowded as you would on an industrial farm as a cow, you are not liberated. You are enslaved. Your reference points are gone. You can't see the stars. You cannot see God's creation. All around you you see drywall and screens. And your ability to think clearly goes away."

No surprise that Democrats can manufacture neurotics almost at the drop of a hat, eh?  Do you think it is co-incidence that Carlson also mentions God?