A healthy majority of unmarried adults, 55% according to the exit polls, voted for Vice President Kamala Harris.

You need to slice this more finely, though, because Harris and President-elect Donald Trump tied among unmarried men. Harris won 61% to 38% among unmarried women.

To get even more specific, among young single women, Harris won nearly 2-to-1: 64% to 35%.

Why? What is it about being a female, young, unmarried adult that would make your politics so different from the rest of the country?

The answer may be fear.

“The politics and the personal preferences of single young women are increasingly defined by fear,” said pollster Dan Cox of the Survey Center on American Life.

Fear was central to the efforts by the Democrats and the news media to rally young women behind Harris. Becoming pregnant is a death sentence. The media would have you believe in its efforts to make abortion bans look inhumane. Republicans would invade your bedroom, monitor your menstrual cycle, and prosecute mothers who suffered miscarriages.

Marriage was also cast as terrifying. The closing narrative pushed by the Harris campaign was that married women were afraid to vote for Harris because their domineering husbands would find out.

One feminist Washington Post colleague, extrapolating from these ads and an off-base Iowa poll showing Harris leading among older women, fantasized that a Harris victory would lead to the liberation of angry housewives. These columns and ads sent a clear message to the young, single women of America: Marriage is a dark and scary prison.

After years of this sort of messaging, more and more young women are uninterested in marrying or having children.

Cox points out that this same cohort got the same sort of dark warning about men in general — from the #MeToo movement.

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“Fears of sexual assault rose dramatically,” Cox reported. “In 2017, 39% of women under 50 reported that they were worried about being sexually assaulted occasionally. By 2023, a majority (55%) of women under 50 reported being at least sometimes concerned about sexual assault.”

Our media and politics, it seems, are cultivating a subculture that is averse to commitment, disdainful toward the opposite sex, and fearful of connection. This is what Democrats call their base.