Why Is Senator Tim Scott's Single Status Relevant?

GOP donors are fretting, a recent story in Axios reported. There is a particular Republican Presidential candidate they are thinking about supporting as an alternative to Trump, but they are apprehensive. Axios had several sources for the story, but they did not want to be named because of the “sensitivity” of the issue. What’s more, the donors’ misgivings have been exacerbated by the candidate’s apparent reluctance to discuss the issue.

What is it that has those donors spooked at a time when multiple impeachments, indictments, and divorces do not seem to be undermining the popularity among the GOP base of another candidate? When, in the past, political leaders from both parties have survived all sorts of scandals?

The candidate the donors are intrigued by but also worried about is Senator Tim Scott. Their concern? It is not any kind of scandal. It is something utterly ordinary: He’s single.

The article does not specify what it is about the Senator’s single status that is making them apprehensive. Other candidates, the reporter notes, like to showcase their families—wife and kids at their side, frolicking at county fairs, for instance. The implication, I suppose, is that Scott cannot do that, and somehow that’s a problem.

Stereotypes of Single People

Research on perceptions of single people, including my own and other scholars’, consistently shows that single people are typically stereotyped and disparaged. For example, they are seen as less mature than married people, even though they are doing the very adult thing of navigating their lives without the substantial benefits and protections married people get in the U.S. and other places just for being married. They are seen as more self-centered, though research has documented important ways in which single people are more generous with their time, money, and caregiving. Perhaps donors’ misgivings are rooted in part in these misleading stereotypes.

What Senator Scott Says About His Single Status When Asked

In an interview with Axios a few months earlier, Senator Scott said he had a girlfriend but did not want to disclose her identity. He also said this:

“The fact that half of America’s adult population is single for the first time, to suggest that somehow being married or not married is going to be the determining factor of whether you’re a good president or not—it sounds like we are living in 1963 and not 2023.”

He is right that record numbers of adults in the U.S. are single, and the proportion of adults who are not married has been increasing for more than half a century. Scott isn’t just single at the moment, though; he’s 57, and he has always been single. Maybe that, too, unnerves those skittish donors. But staying single has also been growing more commonplace. A Pew report estimates that by the time today’s young adults in the U.S. reach the age of 50, about 1 in 4 of them will have been single their whole life.

I don’t know if it is meaningful that Scott specified that he had a girlfriend rather than saying something more general—for example, that he is “seeing someone” without noting whether that someone is a woman. Maybe he was trying to address an anticipated concern of donors and voters, or maybe he would have said that in any case. I also wonder if he felt like he had to say that he was in a romantic relationship rather than saying, for example, that he wanted to discuss policy, not romantic relationships.

Scott had something else to say about being single. According to Axios, he said, “I probably have more time, more energy, and more latitude to do the job,” then added that, nonetheless, “my girlfriend wants to see me when I come home.”

In introducing the quote about having more latitude to do the job, Axios said that he had “spun being single as a potential plus.” That’s more grudging than saying, for example, that Scott had “pointed out” the potential plus of being single (rather than “spun”).

A spokesperson for Scott had this to say to Axios: “Tim Scott’s optimistic, positive message continues to resonate with Iowa and New Hampshire voters who are focused on issues impacting their families.” To me, one potential advantage of political leaders who are single is the possibility that they would break free of all the family talk and explicitly include single people in their goals, plans, policies, and rhetoric. Of course, as the spokesperson’s statement intimates, a person’s single status is no guarantee that they will stand up for single people. Maybe they will feel pressured to reassure donors and voters that they are just like all those other politicians who care primarily, or only, about conventional families.