Blue America candidate Darcy Burner is in the race once again. As everyone here knows, we LOVE candidates who stay in the game, are willing to run and tough enough to withstand a loss to establish name recognition, fight for progressive values that the party should embody and won't waver from them just to pander for votes (like Donna Edwards, Victoria Wulsin and Angie Paccione). Darcy embodies all of these things and she's going to be visiting Blue America with Howie Klein on July 14. (Meanwhile, Chris Carney has turned into an anti-gay menace, along with other members of Congress who banded together to pass what John Aravosis has dubbed the "Samuel David Cheney Gay Bashing Amendment." Rest assured, Carney will not be back.)

Meanwhile, Women's Voices, Women's Votes have just released the results of their recent exhaustive study into the voting habits of unmarried people, both male and female. Among the key findings:

• Unmarried citizens are a surging force in American politics. Currently, there are almost 90 million unmarried adult citizens. More than 52 million of them are registered voters, and almost 37 million are eligible but not registered to vote.
• The majority of households in America (50.3%) are now headed by unmarrieds.
• The story of unmarried America is the story of unmarried women –they account for the largest bloc of unmarried targets (almost 31 million registered voters). There are about 23 million unmarried women who are mobilization targets –including 5 million who were registered but did not vote in 2004, and over 18 million who are not registered currently but are eligible.
• Unmarried voters are change oriented and they want progressive change.
• Unmarried America is economically marginalized compared to married America, and this motivates much of their impulse for change.
• Unmarried Americans are cynical about their government, believing that their voice goes unheard and that their government is run by an elite few.
• This cynicism is a barrier to their participation.

Hillary Clinton took a lot of guff from angry men when she appeared on FDL who did not think that talking about equal pay for women was an important topic for a presidential candidate to be speaking about, but these survey results beg to differ -- unmarried women are a huge, untapped resource of Democratic support who are not being mobilized or motivated to vote. This is largely because the party is not speaking to their economic marginalization and the issues they face as a result, and it's extremely smart and pragmatic of Senator Clinton to use her leadership position to do so.

Please join us on July 14 for our discussion with Darcy, and in the meantime have a look at the WVWV study -- it fascinating and we'll be discussing it in the future, so let us know if you find anything interesting in the comments section.