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Are Republicans Outbreeding Us? [1]

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Date: 2025-01-05

There were a lot of historical reasons to expect Kamala to win, but a major one was the new crop of young voters who had just turned 18 -- the children being born to my generation, Generation X. Historically, we have always been able to count on young voters to vote correctly. Surely, GenX’s kids would do the same.

Since 2008, winning Democratic candidates have received at a minimum 60% support from young people. With the student loan crisis, Dobbs, and so many other issues critical to young people that Democratic issues resonate with, it seemed like that vote should have only strengthened in 2024.

But, as we all know, Harris only received 54% of that critical youth vote.

Pew Research found that more people under 30 were identifying with the GOP than with the Democrats, something that didn't happen in 2020.

Some have argued this horrible scenario is perhaps because of an “excitement gap”. But I suspect it’s in some ways deeper. It gets into who these now-adult children had as parents. More Republican than Democratic than in past cycles, I suspect. I actually don’t just suspect. I know.

A recent study in Biodemography and Social Biology found that “fertility” (defined as the tendency of some people to have more children than others, for whatever reason) is skewing elections in Europe towards the right:

“The findings indicate that ‘demographics and the different fertility rates of left-wing versus right-wing individuals are important to understanding long-term political trends, and that the rise of right-wing parties/individuals we are currently seeing is also a consequence of demographics.’”

The same seems to be happening in the U.S.

Infertile ground

While fertility has been on the decline for decades, it has not been declining so much among Republicans (again, as defined as people having children, whether by choice or otherwise). In 2006, Arthur Brooks found that 100 liberal adults typically produce 147 children, while 100 conservative adults produced 208 children.

Electoral map of 2024? No, it’s a fertility rate map from the CDC.

When you look at a map of 'fertility rates' from the Center for Disease Control for 2022, it looks like an electoral map for 2024. The most fertile state in the nation (the most purple in the CDC map), South Dakota, was one of the strongest for Trump.

It's important to note that what the CDC defines as their “fertility rate” are the number of births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44.

How strange it is that just about all the "purple" high-fertility states voted for Trump (Vermont and New Jersey among exceptions) and low-fertility states generally voted for Harris. Only a few of the "blue wall" swing states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania), along with swing states Nevada and Arizona, had low fertility rates -- and still ended up voting for Trump. Even North Carolina had slightly higher fertility rates.

Despite what we'd like to believe, kids overwhelmingly tend to identify politically with their parents. Democratic parents breed Democratic kids (89 percent of the time), and Republican parents breed Republican kids (81 percent of the time).

Republicans Control (Ctrl) + C themselves

I have long noticed that Gen-X friends who think like I do, will often have a maximum of one kid and more often than not, no children whatsoever. The Gen-X Republicans I have known, on the other hand, have about 4-5 kids per family. Big Gen-X families always seem to be Republican families. Perhaps it's not always true but isn't it generally true? My own family is Democratic and we have one child. Pretty typical.

The Bates Family in 2024: All grown up and registered to vote.

At the extremes you see Republican families like the Bates Family in Tennessee, who have been reviled by many for their support of candidates like Rick Santorum. The patriarch of this family, which spawned 19 Republican voters, is Gen-Xer William Gilvin "Gil" Bates, Jr. He and his wife, Kelly Bates follow the controversial Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) — Christian fundamentalist beliefs that are about as “red state” as you can get.

This family went from two voters in the 1990s to 21 in 2024. How do you think their now grown-up kids are voting, as they’ve left the nest and spread across the nation?

The Bates Family are living examples of the “conservative fertility advantage.” In 2020, we saw that counties that voted for Joe Biden had a 25% lower birthrate average than counties that voted for Donald Trump.

Compare that again to the national map from the Centers for Disease Control, on fertility rates. Again, aside from the blue wall swing states, you are practically looking at a 2024 election results map.

Democrats implement copy protection

There are already countless progressive celebrities who have sworn off having kids, from Chistopher Walken to Bill Maher to Oprah to Keanu Reeves to Miley Cyrus to Leonardo DiCaprio to Chelsea Handler. I can’t think of any conservative celebrities doing the same, although there may be one or two out there.

Chelsea Handler celebrates life without kids.

A May 2024 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that political identity is a primary predictor for the number of children young adults desire to have. Spanning three decades, the research found that young Republicans consistently are expressing stronger and stronger desires to have children, while young Democrats express weaker and weaker desires for the same. The difference has become more pronounced over time too.

"Republicans desired more children than Democrats—a difference that grew over time, from 0.07 in 1989–1993 to 0.29 in 2014–2019."

The study's conclusion: "Political identity has become increasingly salient for fertility desires, suggesting that identity might shape fertility intentions and future fertility behavior."

I wonder if it’s not going to become even more “increasingly salient.” Some Democrats told Newsweek less than a month after the 2024 election that they were sterilizing themselves immediately in response to Kamala's loss. One Iowan OBGYN said her office received a surge of calls from clients asking to get their Fallopian tubes tied in response to Kamala’s defeat.

While I think Democrats actually do have small families because we believe it makes life more manageable, it helps the environment, it's better for the kids, and makes for a more enlightened society, there are consequences to that strategy. The half of our society that is still reproducing at replacement levels isn’t the half we want.

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