GOP Candidate: I'm actually winning if you don't count single moms. [View all]

[RandySF]

The Republican challenger to Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) on Thursday blamed his double-digit lag in the polls on single women and mothers who vote Democratic because they are "wed" to the social safety net and "need benefits to survive."

Jeff Bell told the Asbury Park Press that it's that government-dependent female demographic, not his socially conservative views on issues like abortion and access to contraception, that is weighing him down.

"I've done a lot of thinking about this and looked at a lot of different polls, I think it has more to do with the rise in single women," he explained. "Single mothers particularly are automatically Democratic because of the benefits. They need benefits to survive, and so that kind of weds them to the Democratic Party."

"But single women who have never married and don't have children are also that way," he added. "If you take married women, they aren't that different from married men. So it's really a problem with the decline in marriage rates. The Democrats do benefit from that."

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/jeff-bell-single-mothers