Could Unmarried Women Cost Obama Re-election In 2012?

Ellen Whelan-Wuest, 28, was one of a record number of unmarried women who voted in the presidential election in 2008. Working and campaigning extensively for the Obama campaign in New Hampshire, she remembers seeing a political fervor in people that she had never experienced before.
"It was like a lot of them were adults for the first time, and their candidate reflected everything they hoped for in the world," she told HuffPost from North Carolina, where she's working toward a degree in public policy. "But now, things haven't really moved forward. Some things have, but they don't really care about them as much. We're facing a totally different landscape now, and a lot of people are freaking out."
It is this emerging attitude that has experts wondering if Obama can re-engage with unmarried women -- one of the fastest rising demographics in America, according to census data -- and without whom, the Voter Participation Center concluded, he would have lost the presidency in 2008.
Considering that unmarried women represent 26 percent of the voting population, their support was significant. Though they have consistently supported Democratic candidates since 1992, peaking with Clinton at 62 percent in 1996 and then again for Kerry in 2004, they supported Obama by a steep 70-to-29 percent margin, while the majority of their married counterparts voted for McCain.
But in the past two years, support for the Democratic Party among this coveted group of unmarried female voters has been waning. Only 57 percent voted Democrat in the 2010 midterm elections, and according to a Greenberg Quinlan Rosner (GQR) poll, more than half of white, unmarried women voted Republican. In 2012, the numbers don't look promising for the Democrats.

Read more here:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/21/could-obama-lose-unmarrie_n_1024054.html