Opinion: Here’s how Tim Scott should handle questions about his marital status

Opinion by Sophia A. Nelson

(CNN) — Americans almost always elect presidents who are married. And when it comes to favoring married people, it’s not just US presidents who benefit: Socially as well as economically, society puts a thumb on the scale for married people. For many Americans, just knowing that a person is married speaks well of them: It’s seen as a sign of stability, trustworthiness and one’s ability to commit to another person. 

Being unmarried, by contrast, sends exactly the opposite message. That strikes me as off-base, however, considering that a Pew study a couple of years ago found fully one quarter of all 40-year-olds in the US have never been married.

Singles in this country have always held second-class status compared to married people. But marital unions aren’t always a bed of roses. What about the countless loveless marriages? There are myriad marriages of convenience that lumber along year after year for the sake of the kids or because the couple can’t decide how to amicably divide the marital assets.

Despite all that, the societal pressure to marry persists. Nowhere is that more evident than in our presidential politics: The last bachelor elected president, after all, was Grover Cleveland in 1884.

Now Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina is running to be the next one as he seeks the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. The 57-year-old’s marital status has become a more prominent issue after a recent news report by Axios that some conservative donors are becoming skittish about supporting an unmarried candidate for president.

Boston Globe political columnist Renée Graham wrote last week that some donors’ reticence may be fueled by homophobia — the wrongheaded belief that an unmarried man of a certain age must be gay. Republicans may not be keen “to support someone they might believe could be a closeted gay man,” Graham wrote in a column.

Now, I’m no great fan of Scott’s, but I’d be the first to tell those donors that their concerns about his bachelor status are out-of-bounds. Being married would not make him a stronger candidate — or a better president. We stigmatize singleness in this country, and that needs to change. It’s hard to know why voters seem to care whether their presidents are married, but it’s undeniable that appearing on the stump with one’s photogenic children and spouse in tow is a standard campaign play.

Scott, who had been doing his best to downplay the issue of his marital status, has suggested that he is in a romantic relationship. In May, apparently even before campaign donors began to express their concerns, he told Axios that he had a girlfriend, without disclosing her identity.

“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’re living in 1963 and not 2023,” Scott told Axios.

Last week, the senator suggested that concerns over the fact that there is not a Mrs. Scott campaigning at his side may actually be the result of machinations by his political opponents.

“People plant stories … to distract from our rise in the polls, to distract from our size of our audience,” Scott said. “What we’ve seen is that poll after poll says that the voters don’t care, but it seems like opponents do care, and so media coverage that opponents plant,” he said. “It’s OK. Good news is, we just keep fighting the good fight.”

The discussion about Scott’s bachelorhood reminds me of similar questions that were raised about Cory Booker, the unmarried Democratic senator from New Jersey who confirmed a relationship with famed actress Rosario Dawson in March 2019, a few weeks after announcing his White House bid.

Then there was Lindsey Graham. When he was running for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, Graham, the senior senator from South Carolina, told the Daily Mail that his sister would be part of a rotating cast who would fulfill the duties of first lady if he should be elected president.

In a June 2015 interview, Graham told CNN that not having a first lady should not hinder his chances of becoming president and that single people should be able to run for the US presidency.

“I would tell people — you know, marriage is a wonderful thing. If you’re married with kids and have got a great marriage, that’s a blessing from God,” Graham said back then. “But it’s okay to be single. My goal is to tell every single person you too can grow up to be president.”

It’s hard to take issue with any of that. Under the US Constitution, an individual running for president must be at least 35 years of age, a natural born citizen and a resident of the United States for at least 14 years. There’s nothing in the document about being married.

Conservative donors should not disqualify a worthy candidate from pursuing the highest office in our nation simply because he’s not wearing a wedding ring. I can think of a handful of presidents who wore one — Andrew Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump spring to mind — whose personal flaws would suggest that you can’t judge character by one’s marital status.

In 2020, I considered running for Congress. I encountered similar questions from prospective donors to the ones being raised about Scott about why I never married and have no children.

I remember sitting with my advisers, compiling a list of every guy I dated since high school through college up to the present day. I had their permission to release their names and to be contacted if need be. In the end, I decided to wait, but candidly, the entire experience was deeply unsettling.

If I were Tim Scott, I would confront the issue head on. Remember then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s speech about race when he was still introducing himself to the American voters? If I were Scott, I’d hold a similar press availability on the subject of bachelorhood. I’d talk about past relationships. I’d introduce the nation to my current significant other.

And I’d be sure to drill down on the critically important point that his marital status is no more disqualifying than Obama’s race was. As a nation, we should choose our presidents on qualities that really matter.

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