Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at The American Spectator.
In decades of teaching sociology, I have explained to students that the most important factors shaping societies are the least “glitzy.” One of these is demographics. It is boring but powerful.
A king among these vital statistics is fertility, especially in the context of death rates and life expectancy. Who is having more babies and who is not? How many survive childhood? How many reach old age?
Birth rates are a proverbial large boat that slowly crushes the dock, with few people noticing it until it is too late to fix. Small changes building over time lead to massive consequences. As birth rates crash and lives get longer worldwide, we are in such a historical moment.
But some are doing much better in the fertility “arms race.” And to those who both have more babies and properly raise them, I would say, quoting my favorite Rudyard Kipling poem, “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.”
Nowhere is this truer than in the fact that, in the United States at least, conservatives are having more babies than liberals. A lot more. This has been true for over 45 years, with the gap growing ever wider.
Yes, fertility is dropping for conservatives too. But they have declined the least. Within the last few weeks this has become big news, mostly because of handwringing by progressive pundits who have just figured out how bad their steep relative demographic decline is, and what this means for their political and cultural ambitions.
This difference shows up no matter what angle you approach it from. Politicians, voters, geographic regions, and surveys.
I recently bumped into a 2022 PR Newswire article about children and U.S. senators. Here is what they found: “The percentage of senators with zero or one child is 30% in the Democratic Party but only 14% in the Republican Party. On the other hand, senators with four or more kids constitute only 8% in the Democratic Party and a whopping 26% in the Republican Party.”
It is not just politicians but voters that show this pattern of conservatives having more children. Last year, City Journal published a piece about shockingly lower births in blue cities and suburbs compared to more conservative locales. One set of comparisons showed that blue cities had fertility rates that were from 8% to 25% lower than red ones. And a San Francisco suburb was 57% lower than one “outside San Antonio.” The author aptly called this the “deep blue birth dearth.”
Most Americans live in cities or suburbs. Population numbers are tied to congressional representation. Long range, this is a massive roadblock to expansive progressive dreams in blue cities and counties, since it all requires lots of tax revenue, which you get less of with fewer taxpayers.
The political future belongs to the places having more babies, all other things being equal. Republican senators having more children is a curious fact, but Republican voters having a lot more children is a threat to Democratic aspirations.
This angst was clear in a commentary that John Burn-Murdoch gave along with his powerful research published in the Financial Times on August 29. Here is what he said about it on X, “For all the talk of a general fall in births, the drop is overwhelmingly driven by people on the left having fewer kids.” To make sure they all got the point, his article was titled “Why Progressives Should Care About Falling Birth Rates.”
Burn-Murdoch gave the salient details on X, complete with a line chart which was reproduced across social media. It showed that, from being about the same in the late 1970s, birth rates had fallen off a cliff for self-identified progressives, while dipping much less for conservatives. The gap between them now is enormous and still widening.
On that lengthy thread, Burn-Murdoch delivered ominous warnings to those on the left: “By ceding the topic of family and children to the right, progressives risk ushering in a more conservative world.” Yes, he agrees, “pro-natalism often implies constraining individual liberty and setting back women’s progress. As such, the left’s aversion to worrying about birth rates is perfectly natural.” However, “the consequence of this emerging ideological slant in birth rates is that each successive generation gets nudged rightwards, increasing the likelihood that conservative politicians (who want to constrain individual liberty and set back women’s progress) get elected.” Translated? “I know that most liberals don’t want to have more children, but if they don’t, in the long run, they will lose.”
Then, as if on cue, an article appeared a little over a month ago in the Institute for Family Studies further documenting the depth of conservatives’ long-term population advantage. Drawing on their previous work, the authors reminded readers that, in November 2024, counties that had higher margins of victory for Kamala Harris had much lower fertility than those that favored Donald Trump. The same was true at the state level.
Looking further, the authors—Scott Yenor and Lyman Stone—examined a larger survey data set from 2021-25 comparing conservative with moderate and liberal women. Not only did conservative women have a lot more babies, but that they were more likely to both (a) get married (and younger too), and (b) want more children, having a larger “ideal family size.” This is how they put it: “It turns out that conservative women don’t just have more children than liberal women; conservative women want more children than liberal women, and they’re likelier to marry, and to marry young enough to have more children.”
I checked things out myself using the combined General Social Survey for the years 2021 through 2024. I selected respondents between 35 and 50 years of age and included both men and women, comparing the numbers of children of Democrats versus Republicans, and of conservatives versus moderates and liberals.
Right in line with all the other research, it was clear that Republicans and conservatives have more children. The Democrats and “lean Democrats” were more than 1.6 times more likely than Republicans and “lean Republican” to be childless (26% versus 16%), and the Republicans were more than 1.4 times more likely to have three or more kids (34% versus 24%). Self-identified liberals were 2.3 times more likely than conservatives to be childless (32% versus 14%), and conservatives were 1.8 times more likely to have three or more (37% versus 21%). Moderates were higher than liberals but lower than conservatives.
The Institute for Family Studies had mentioned the importance of marriage, so I checked that too. Indeed, Republicans and conservatives were a lot more likely to be married, and married folk had more kids. But when I compared the number of children for even married liberals versus conservatives, the results surprised me. Conservatives were still having more children. Married liberals were a whopping three times more likely to be childless (21% versus 7%), and married conservatives were 1.8 times more likely to have had three or more (23% versus 41%). (Again, moderates were above liberals but lower than conservatives.) Yes, if more liberals got married, they would have more kids. But unless marriage also dropped a lot among conservatives, their relative disadvantage in fertility would remain.
I also checked church attendance, which is normally associated with more children too, as it was in my GSS data. Liberals go to church a lot less. But even here, when I compared numbers of children for both liberals and conservatives who attend church at least two to three times a month, there was still a huge gap. Regular church-going liberals were 2.4 times more likely to be childless (19% versus 8%), while their conservative counterparts were 1.2 times more likely to have one or two kids (52% versus 45%), although only a little more likely to have three or more kids (39% versus 36%). (Again, moderates were lower than conservatives but higher than liberals.)
For the coup de grace, I compared liberals and conservatives who were both married and went to church at least two to three times per month, even though liberals were much less likely to be represented in this group. (Of all those 35 through 50 who were both married and went to church this regularly, 53% were conservative, 33% were moderate, and only 14% were liberals.) This was the closest thing to them being the same, but even here liberals were 2.3 times more likely to be childless (9% versus 4%), and conservatives were a bit more likely to have one or two (52% versus 47%). Three or more children, for those both married and regularly attending church, was a virtual tie (liberals at 43%, conservatives at 44%).
Is it likely that Democrats will have more babies just because they want more voters 20 years from now than Republicans do? And is it likely that liberals will become as committed to both marriage and active church attendance as conservatives, not for pragmatic purposes but out of real heart change that has led them to embrace both more than they currently do? I doubt it.
No one should run out and get married, or have babies, or go to church, as part of a long-term strategy to take over the world. These are goods that must flow from the heart, because we come to believe that marriage, and children, and worshipping the Lord together with others who love Him and support us in pursuing fruitful lives that honor Him, are intrinsically wonderful and need no external justification.
Still, we social scientists cannot ignore the real-world outcomes when competing groups make radically different decisions about these things consistently over time.
Burn-Murdoch sure hasn’t.