There’s a scene in the Brock Landers documentary—the movie-within-a-movie tucked away inside Boogie Nights—where Dirk Diggler explains how his work in adult films is actually a public service:
Well maybe Donald Trump is the anti-Diggler. Earlier this wake the polling firm Wakefield Research sent around a press release touting to results of a survey that suggest that in addition to everything else, Trump is ruining couples’ relationships, too.
Using a 1,000 person sample, Wakefield asked people a battery of questions about Trump and their relationships. Here’s what they found:
Let’s start with the most plausible-sounding stuff: Item (6) says that among millennials who are not in any sort of relationship and did not vote for Trump, 43 percent of them say that they would consider divorcing some hypothetical spouse who did vote for Trump? Which sounds like maybe the most millennial thing, ever. I’m willing to believe that 100 percent.
Ditto for #2, which is notably not tied to Trump. Would you believe that one out of every five millennials has ended a relationship over political differences? That’s a solid-gold lock.
And I’d probably go along with #1, too. Sure, it’s hearsay—”do you know anyone who”-type questions will always goose results since they’re not self-reporting. But also, it’s not hard to imagine a couple where both are in-sync politically, but one party is taking the elections harder than the other: Of course Tennyson hates that Trump is president, but Addison is so dejected that xe can barely get out of bed in the morning and that’s creating friction.
But the rest of it? I don’t know. On the one hand, the exit polling showed a pretty dramatic split between married men and married women: 57 percent of married men voted for Trump, but only 47 percent of married women. That translates to 21.32 million married male Trump voters and 18.19 million married female Trump voters. Even if all of those couples were perfectly sorted, that would still leave 3 million married couples who split their votes. That they’re probably not perfectly sorted means the number is probably higher. By a lot.
That’s a lot of awkward dinner conversations:
“Honey, did you see what the president said about the Civil War today?”
“Who cares, he’s going to build The Wall and make Mexico pay for it.”
“Hmmmm. Did you see Ann Coulter’s column?”
But on the other hand, divorce is pretty complicated as a statistical construct. The overall failure rate for marriage in America sits just north of 40 percent. But that’s just the percentage of all marriages. That failure rate ticks downward by a lot once you start adding factors: Is it a first marriage? Was the couple over the age of 22 when they tied the knot? Do they regularly attend religious services together? Did they graduate from college? Start checking off enough of these boxes and all of a sudden the failure rate becomes a fraction of that big number.
And if you check off a different set of boxes—Is it a second or third marriage? Does one of the parties smoke? Do they have net assets below $10,000?—then the numbers go sky-high. The failure rate on third marriages is close to 75 percent.
Until you know what sort of couples make up the Wakefield sample—and remember, the n is only 1,000—then you don’t really know if the complaints about splits are above or below the norm. That’s the detailed problem with the results.
The broad problem is that Wakefield’s numbers conflate marriage and the incredibly nebulous term “relationship.” Is it a relationship if you went out a couple times with some girl you met on OK Cupid, but then broke up because she didn’t like your politics? Wakefield left that up to the respondents to decide, so you’re not even getting a uniform definition.
Because if so, any survey that combines that “relationship” with a marriage is hopelessly confused on so many levels as to be worthless. This isn’t a value judgment, just an observation that the exit costs for the two categories are of an entirely different order.
And there’s one more problem: Would arguing about Trump be a cause or a symptom of a broken relationship? If you have a married couple that’s headed toward divorce and they have political differences, Trump’s election won’t help them any. But it probably won’t be the cause of an eventual divorce—it’s just one more thing they fight about. If it wasn’t Trump, it’d be something else.
This isn’t meant to pick on Wakefield. But it is part of a larger problem with the Trump “resistance.” If you think Donald Trump is a conventional politician, then by all means, try to score as many points as possible by blaming him for anything that goes wrong, anywhere. That’s politics in modern America, for better or for worse.
But if you truly believe that Donald Trump represents a unique and serious threat to America (not an unreasonable theory, btw) then this approach probably isn’t the best idea. You should focus on Trump’s real sins and ill effects so that if Armageddon actually comes, you haven’t been crying wolf.
