By Katharine Q. Seelye, The New York Times

Read the original article at Black Picket Fences: The Mayor of Singleville.

Singles, educate yourselves on who is running, because apparently, the singles will make the most difference in the presidential election this year. You make the difference.

The so-called marriage gap, in which single people vote differently from married people, has been evident in the last three presidential campaigns, with married voters tending to support the Republican and unmarrieds supporting the Democrat.

But the pursuit of single women by the Democratic presidential candidates may intensify this year, and a new report out today helps explain why. It describes unmarried women -- and to a lesser extent, unmarried men -- as the nation’s “biggest untapped political resource.”

Using census data, the new report says that unmarried women account for nearly 25 percent of all eligible voters. The data was compiled with other research by Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, and Women’s Voices, Women Vote, a non-partisan group created in 2004 to urge unmarried people to vote.

If single women are mobilized, as they were in the 2006 Senate race in Missouri, the report said, they could make a difference in elections.

Almost 50 million women 18 and over are single, separated, divorced or widowed. Of the nation’s big demographic groups, including Hispanics and African-Americans, single women are growing the fastest.

The problem is, many of them don’t go to the polls. In 2004, only about 55 percent of single women voted, the report said, while 71 percent of married women voted. But their share of the electorate is increasing.

Single women who do vote, Ms. Lake said in a conference call today with reporters, overwhelmingly favor change, and their lives are dominated by issues of wages and health care. The biggest issue for them, as it is for others, she said, is the war in Iraq. “Single women were the first people to turn dramatically against the war and want to get out,” she said.

Still, most campaigns have not reached out to them, Ms. Lake said. While she is working this year for the presidential bid of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Delaware Democrat, she said that several of the Democrats could make a legitimate appeal to single women -- Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton because she is a woman, Senator Barack Obama because he advocates change, former Senator John Edwards because his campaign is focused on those on the economic margins, as many single women are, and Mr. Biden because “he has a concrete plan to get out of Iraq.”

A recent Gallup survey found that single women and married women have equally favorable views of many of the current crop of Democratic candidates. But it found that single women have much more positive views than married women have of both Mrs. Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore, who may or may not get in the race.

About 58 percent of Democratic primary voters are women. The Clinton campaign has said it wants to push that number to 60 percent.

But whom do single women admire most? It is not a politician, Ms. Lake said. It is Queen Latifah.

“She’s a strong, independent, give-them-hell female,” she said. “That’s their role model.”