On balance, Asian Americans prefer a big government that provides more services (55%) over a smaller government than provides fewer services (36%). In contrast, the general public prefers a smaller government over a bigger government, by 52% to 39%.While they differ on the role of government, Asian Americans are close to the public in their opinions about two key social issues. By a ratio of 53% to 35%, Asian Americans say homosexuality should be accepted by society rather than discouraged. And on the issue of abortion, 54% of Asian Americans say it should be legal in all or most cases, while 37% say it should be illegal.
Singles and Single Women
According to a December 2011 Pew poll, the percentage of non-married people in the US has been climbing. Only 51% of those polled reported being married in that poll. And among people 18-29, forty four percent believed marriage was becoming obsolete.
A Guardian article reports,
" The unmarried women of the 2012 make up almost 40% of the African American population, nearly 30% of the Latino population, and about a third of all young voters, or 32.7%, according to the research released on Thursday. They are divorced, separated, widowed, or have never married.... More and more Americans are single. Singe people are now the majority in about 15 or 16 states -- several of them the swing states that decide presidential elections, said Celinda Lake, the Democraticpollster and strategist.
Among women, unmarried women made up about 20% of the electorate in the 2008 elections. By 2012, about 23% of voters were single women -- and they opted overwhelmingly for Obama, giving him 67% of their votes.
The challenge for Democrats, however, is that unmarried women have not always been reliable voters. Nearly 11 million of the single women who turned out for Obama in 2008 skipped the 2010 congressional elections, which led to the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives."
Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute, (AEI) reports,
Married voters : The voting gap between married and unmarried voters is much larger than the gender gap. In all recent elections, married voters have favored the Republican candidate and unmarried voters the Democrat. This year, 56% of married voters favored Romney and 42% favored Obama. Unmarried voters can be never married, widowed, or divorced. Many in this category are single and young. In 2008, 65% of them voted for Obama; in 2012 62% did. Non-married women supported Obama more strongly (67%) than did non-married men (56%). The not-married portion of the population is growing.The marriage gap in this election was 41 points. The gender gap was 18.
I started this article because, having seen Abdus-Sattar Ghazali's article reporting that 85% of Muslims voted for President Obama, and there are an estimated 2.5 to 7 million in the USA.
That got me wondering about Buddhists. I couldn't find any specific stats on Buddhist voting, but about 14% of Asian Americans are Buddhist. There are also a growing number of formerly Christian or Jewish Americans who identify themselves as Buddhist.
Finally we have the youth. Romney and the Republicans thought and hoped the young would lose motivation and not show up for this election. The opposite happened. Policymic.com reports,
Predictions that the youth voter turnout of 2008 was a fluke or that the youth is largely apathetic fell flat on Tuesday. Youth voters, aged 18-29, turned out as 19% of the electoral vote -- a 1% increase from the 2008 election -- and these voters were overwhelmingly in favor of President Obama.Although youth voters were not as one-sided in 2012 as in 2008 (66% and 32% in 2008 vs. 60% and 37% in 2012) it still had a substantial impact on the election. According to a study by The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, the youth vote affected "at least 80" electoral votes. Had Romney been able to split the youth vote in key states like Ohio (62% Obama vs. 35% Romney) or Florida (66% Obama vs. 32% Romney), these blue states could have flipped to red.
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