Several studies suggest that people in red states have more babies than those in blue states. A new report from a conservative-leaning group says that could have implications for politics and culture.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Does being more conservative mean having more kids? Several studies suggest that people in red states have more babies than those in blue states. And now a new report from a conservative-leaning group argues that that could have implications for politics and culture in the U.S. down the road. NPR political correspondent Sarah McCammon has been following this and joins us now. Hi there.
SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: Hey, Juana.
SUMMERS: Hey there. So Sarah, just start by telling us, what is the connection between where people fall on the political spectrum and the number of kids they have?
MCCAMMON: Yeah. So several studies in recent years have pointed to higher fertility rates in red states, and that’s especially true since the COVID pandemic. Now a new report from the conservative-leaning Institute for Family Studies argues that young adults who identify as conservative are having more babies than their liberal counterparts. Brad Wilcox is a senior fellow at the institute and a co-author of the report.
BRAD WILCOX: That has clear implications, you know, potentially for everything from kind of public schools to congressional districts to just sort of, again, kind of the trajectory of the country, politically and otherwise.
MCCAMMON: And these authors looked at young adults ages 25 to 35 who self-identify as liberal or conservative. They found that young liberal women today are much less likely to have children than young conservative women, with a gap of more than 30 percentage points. And that’s a big change since the 1980s, when there was a much smaller gap between liberal and conservative women.
SUMMERS: How much could birth rates in red states or blue states predict the way people vote in the future?
MCCAMMON: The theory is that children are likely to take after their parents, so this would mean more Republican voters in the future. But Melissa Deckman of the Public Religion Research Institute says that’s not necessarily the case.
MELISSA DECKMAN: It’s very clear that states that have had more Trump votes are seeing an increase in child population. But remember, these children are not yet voters. And so if you’re trying to speculate how they’re going to vote in 10, 20 years, I think it’s really difficult to conclude that this will advantage the Republican Party.
MCCAMMON: Deckman says another huge variable is just President Trump himself because he’s such a unique political figure and it’s unclear what direction either party will go after he’s no longer on the scene.
SUMMERS: Do we know why young conservatives might be having more children than young liberals?
MCCAMMON: You know, there’s a lot of speculation about this. Republicans are more likely to be religious than Democrats, and there is a long-standing correlation between being more religious and having larger families. So that could be a reason. The authors of this new report argue that conservatives prioritize marriage and family in ways they say liberals may not. Leslie Root, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, says the partisan divide is real, but she says the report leaves out a lot of women who choose to have their children later.
LESLIE ROOT: And so I really think that looking at this small section of people 25 to 35 is playing into this narrative that there’s this huge and growing disparity that’s really, to my mind, not true.
MCCAMMON: And by the end of their childbearing years, she says most women across the political spectrum do end up having kids. So this is a data point. It’s an interesting and important one, but it’s still an open question what the relationship between birth rates and political ideology will mean for U.S. politics in the long term.
SUMMERS: NPR’s Sarah McCammon, thanks so much.
MCCAMMON: Thank you.
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