August 2006: Republicans are winning the baby battle!

A post from 2006:

Birth rates?

This is not a new subject. David Brooks wrote about it after the '04 election. He called it The New Red-Diaper Babies, a reference to the reality that Republicans are having babies and Democrats are not.

Check out Brooks:

"As Steve Sailer pointed out in The American Conservative, George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates, and 25 of the top 26. John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest rates.

In The New Republic Online, Joel Kotkin and William Frey observe, "Democrats swept the largely childless cities - true blue locales like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boston and Manhattan have the lowest percentages of children in the nation - but generally had poor showings in those places where families are settling down, notably the Sun Belt cities, exurbs and outer suburbs of older metropolitan areas."

What does this mean? The answer may be in today's article by Arthur C. Brooks (no relation to the aforementioned David Brooks) The fertility gap:

"Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result.

According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children.

If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids.

That's a "fertility gap" of 41%."

Beyond numbers, I believe that we are seeing the cultural divide in the US. Again, let's read from Brooks:

"The fertility gap doesn't budge when we correct for factors like age, income, education, sex, race--or even religion.
Indeed, if a conservative and a liberal are identical in all these ways, the liberal will still be 19 percentage points more likely to be childless than the conservative.
Some believe the gap reflects an authentic cultural difference between left and right in America today."

This is exactly right!

This divide showed up in the 2004 presidential vote. This is how people voted, according to a CNN exit poll:

Bush won the Protestant vote (59-40) and the Catholics (52-47%). These two groups represented 75% of the electorate.

Bush won the Church attendance vote (61-39%).

Bush won the married vote (57-42%) and married with children (59-41%).

This "fertility gap" makes sense.

Thank you Republican parents. Thank you for doing your part!