WASHINGTON: Beyonce was right: it was all the single ladies who put their hands up. New research reveals Barack Obama owes his re-election victory to the unmarried women who turned out in their millions to vote for him.

Nearly a quarter of the voters in Tuesday’s election were unmarried women — and Obama captured more than two-thirds of their votes, 67 per cent, according to research released by the Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund. “Unmarried women were the drivers of the president’s victory,” said Page Gardner, the president of WVWVAF.

The finding might seem unsurprising after an election season punctuated by offensive and biologically illiterate statements from Republican candidates about rape and pregnancy. But pollsters said the electoral bloc of unmarried women voted for Obama for bringing the country through the recession — with the Democrats’ support for healthcare, equal pay and planned parenthood coming close behind.

Mitt Romney did better than Obama among married women, outperforming the president by 7 points. But Obama obliterated Romney when it came to the votes of unmarried women, beating him by 36 points.

American pollsters have a history of coming up with new labels for core sections of the electorate. In Bill Clinton’s time, there were the soccer moms. George Bush had his security moms in 2004. In the 2008 contest, Sarah Palin tried to create a new brand of conservative woman with hockey moms and mama grizzlies.

But in a striking demographic shift, the most crucial component of the women’s vote is no longer white, married middle-class suburbanites, but a broad coalition of unmarried women, people of colour and those under the age of 30.

The unmarried women of 2012 make up almost 40 per cent of the African-American population, nearly 30 per cent of the Latino population, and 32.7 per cent of all young voters, according to research released on Thursday. They are divorced, separated, widowed or have never married. “They had an enormous influence on Tuesday’s election,” said Gardner.

Single women have traditionally been Democrat voters, largely for economic reasons. They tend to have less money than married women — because they don’t have a husband’s earnings to fall back on. They also tend to be less educated.

“A lot of it simply has to do with economics and affluence,” said Susan Carroll, of the Centre for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “The Democrats are much more supportive of the social safety net, the programmes that help people who need financial assistance, whether it be unemployment insurance, child nutrition programmes, Medicaid, the whole infrastructure of the social welfare state that helps people who financially are more in need.”

The clue to Obama’s re-election victory, however, could be a combination of changing demographic patterns and turnout. More and more Americans are single. Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster and strategist, said single people were now the majority in about 15 or 16 states — several of them the swing states that decide presidential elections.

Unmarried women made up about 20 per cent of the electorate in the 2008 elections. By 2012, about 23 per cent of voters were single women — and they opted overwhelmingly for Obama.

Along with crediting Obama for guiding the country through the recession, unmarried women strongly supported his equal pay provisions, which was the first piece of legislation the president signed into law.

They backed Obama on healthcare, including birth control and abortion, which Lake argues are as much economic as social issues.

Another critical factor may have been pride. “They [unmarried women] are very economically stressed and stretched in terms of the wage gap,” said Gardner. “There is a sense that they are on their own. They know and they are very proud of the fact that they are making it on their own. They are contributing to this country in enormous ways but they are on their own so it is a different world view.”

Or, to borrow from another Beyonce hit, they are the independent women voters.

By arrangement with the Guardian