The liberal media always find it helpful when a liberal Republican parrots one of their major themes.  Recently, Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona was only too happy to oblige.

When you look at some of the audiences cheering for Republicans, sometimes, you look out there and you say, 'those are the spasms of a dying party.'

"When you look at the lack of diversity, sometimes, and it depends on where you are, obviously, but by and large, we're appealing to older white men and there are just a limited number of them, and anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy," he continued.

The article went on to focus on Republicans' lack of appeal to women, citing Roy Moore, accused of child molestation, who failed to get a majority of the women's vote.  If a person accused of child molestation can't get a majority of the women's vote, neither can any Republican, the article writer theorizes.

Except that isn't really true.  Hillary Clinton won just 54% of the women's vote, and Trump actually won a majority of the votes of white women.  Even more interestingly, while Trump lost single women two to one, he basically tied Hillary among married women.

Here's Hillary Clinton, who is perhaps the leading expert on married women, offering an explanation for this:

Last week, Clinton, who has had a lifetime to contemplate the women's vote, copped to having a theory. "[Women] will be under tremendous pressure – and I'm talking principally about white women. They will be under tremendous pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers not to vote for 'the girl'," she said in an interview as part of a tour promoting her new memoir of the 2016 campaign.

But social science backs up Clinton's anecdotal hunch.

I never doubted that "social science" would fail to back up any of Mrs. Clinton's hunches.

"We think she was right in her analysis about women getting pressure from men in their lives, specifically [straight (brackets in original –ed.)] white women," said Kelsy Kretschmer, an assistant professor at Oregon State University and a co-author of a recent study examining women's voting patterns.

"We know white men are more conservative, so when you're married to a white man you get a lot more pressure to vote consistent with that ideology."

The key distinction, according to Kretschmer's research, is that single women tend to cast votes with the fate of all women in mind, while women married to men vote on behalf of their husbands and families (the study was based on a poll of straight women conducted in 2012, before same-sex marriage [sic] was legalized nationwide, and draws no conclusions about marriages [sic] where neither partner is a man).

So, we are told, single women vote with the interest of the "fate of all women" in mind (how dramatic!), while married women are basically enslaved by their husbands.

Let's assume, just this once, that liberals are wrong.  What other explanations could there be?

1) Single women include those who have multiple children and are on welfare.  They vote for people who will continue to give them welfare.

2) Single women include those who have unrestrained sex lives and use abortion for birth control.  Their reasons for preferring Democrats are obvious.

3) Single women include lesbians, who are less likely to marry than women who love men.

4) Married women may marry because they are less antagonistic toward men than single women, and so less susceptible to the siren song of "the fate of all women hangs in the balance" appeals.

5) Married women have been known to have children, and the increased costs of having said children make one sympathetic to lower taxes and more economic freedom.

6) Married women are exposed, for perhaps the first time in their lives, to points of view they never heard at Smith or Wellesley and, having heard an opposing point of view for the first time in their lives, decide it has some merit.

Exit question: What do you think is the most likely reason that married women are more likely to vote Republican?

Ed Straker is the senior writer at Newsmachete.com.