In yesterday's Morning Briefing, we wrote about two well-known ideas: the first, the gender polarization of the electorate, and the second, the idea that getting married makes you (and particularly women) more likely to vote Republican. We quoted, approvingly, an aphorism by Saurabh Sharma to the effect that the GOP coalition is "men and the women who love them", i.e., "men and married women." It's a nice phrase.

Then, one of our favorite things happened (seriously, we love it when you do this): one of our subscribers had a quibble with our argument.

EPPC's Patrick T Brown, who writes the excellent "Family Matters" Substack on all things family policy (you should subscribe, but only if it doesn't cut in on your PolicySphere reading time), had several counterarguments.

The first, which frankly we have a hard time wrapping our heads around, is that if Republicans spend too much energy on promoting marriage, they may end up in a counterproductive situation where they look like they're only promoting marriage for grubby political reasons, ie getting people to vote Republicans, and this would undermine marriage.

The second, which we found much more interesting, is that the idea that getting married makes people (and specifically women) more Republican is oversold. "Married women are more likely to be white and older, so controlling for age tells a much narrower story."

By the way, for some of us, the fact that the "marriage-makes-you-more-Republican" story has seemingly become this famous talking point (Brown cited Jesse Waters, Fox News' primetime host, making this argument), so that it's now contrarian to debunk it, is funnily unusual. The data around this was originally unearthed in the early 2000s by journalist and golf enthusiast Steve Sailer, and for many years the idea that there could be this positive political-societal flywheel where Republicans get more people married, which causes more people to vote Republican, which causes more marriage, and more generally more wholesomeness, which means more Republicans elected, and so on, was known as the "Steve Sailer strategy" and was very much seen as a contrarian or strange viewpoint. The fact that we now have, roughly 20 years later, primetime Fox News hosts stating this idea as a fact, is wild. Anyway.

Is it true, though? "The parties are increasingly polarizing along educational lines - and marriage is increasingly correlated with college attainment," Brown writes. In an email, he followed up with something that makes intuitive sense: "It’s not that marriage doesn’t help the GOP, but that it doesn’t counteract the rising educational polarization we are seeing (college-educated married women under 45 have a 10-point edge for the Democrats.)"

Of course, one might counter that this is all the more reason to promote marriage, to fight the marriage crisis in America which means that to many Americans in the underclass, marriage, and the goods associated with it, increasingly become a mirage.

What we don't understand is the first point. Brown endorsed a phrase by leftist journalist Jane Coaston to the effect that Republican ideas around marriage promotion represent "corrective marriage," that is to say, "Not marriage because it's good, or marriage because of love, but marriage as a corrective so that women, specifically, stop voting in a way that you personally do not like."

But this puts the cart entirely before the horse.

One of the great things about democracy is that, when it works anyway, it aligns the incentives between the government and the population. The people running the country have an interest in making things better, because if they do, more people will vote to reelect them, and if they don't, they'll vote for the other guy, who then has an incentive to make things better, because if they do, etc. etc. Of course, it's more complicated than that, but sometimes simplifying is also clarifying. The whole point of our system of government, or so we were told, is that policies that are substantively good are also in the interests of the people enacting them.

If anything, people promoting these ideas should be accused of what we (and maybe others?) have christened the Pundit's Fallacy: the belief that policies that you believe are substantively good are also in the political interest of your party.

That's a totally fair accusation in this instance. Pro-marriage Republican pundits and wonks clearly believe that promoting marriage is a specific good on its own, and as a result are motivated to come up with reasons why it's also in the political interest of the Republican Party to pursue such policies. Which doesn't mean they're wrong about it! Or that they're right! But this is clearly what's happening.

One sees the absurdity of the argument if one replaces "marriage" with any other kind of good that is widely liked and that politicians talk about delivering, say, "jobs", or "rising incomes", or "safe streets", or "better schools."

Both parties, for example, say they want "better schools," although they have very different views on how to get there. Obviously they want better schools because they think better schools would be a good thing for the country. Equally obviously, they also want better schools, in part, because they believe that delivering better schools would lead more people to vote for their party. Saying "Oh, you don't want better schools (or more jobs, or rising incomes, or safe streets) because you think education (or prosperity, or law and order) is good, but just because you want parents (or people in the labor force, or people who live in unsafe neighborhoods) to vote for you" would not be right or wrong per se, just very bizarre. Again, we were told this was the point of this system of government.

This is why the Pundit's Fallacy is so tempting to begin with. As a rule, pundits, policy wonks, and the like, of every party, have certain beliefs about which policies would make the world better, and they also believe that if their team applied these policies and thereby (as they believe) made the world a better place, then naturally more people would be more likely to vote for their team. Again, there's a lot of devils in those details, but the general idea holds. We're not saying that's the way the world works in every instance, just that it's a perfectly natural way to think and that there's nothing intrinsically underhanded about thinking that way.

And by the same token, the idea that this imputation of political self-interest would cause a backlash seems far-fetched. Again, the comparison with any other popular good is clear. Find us the voter who says "Yes, President Smith delivered rising income and safer streets and better schools for me and my family, but he only did it because he thought he'd get reelected that way, the bastard, so I'm voting for the other guy."

To coin a phrase, it is not from the generosity of the politician that the citizen expects his improved public policies.

There are two questions here. One is whether getting married, in general, improves people's lot in life and makes them happier. There are reams and reams and reams of social science saying yes. The other is whether getting married causes people to vote Republican. There's some evidence to suggest yes, but, and we take Brown's point, there's also evidence that goes in the other direction. Teasing out causal effects in social data is always extremely complicated. But there's nothing wrong about believing that the answer to both questions is yes.

We still lean that way. And yet, we're not in the pocket of Big Marriage.

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