Democrats and the Fertility Gap

Arthur C. Brooks has authored the feature article at Opinion Journal. In it, he explains why the liberals may have a larger political problem in the future because they are not multiplying, there is a "fertility gap" that they may not be able to overcome.

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%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little
Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%--explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.

Of course not every child grows up to have the same political views as his parents (see the 60's), but more often than not they do. Brooks doesn't see this fertility gap changing anytime soon, even when "we correct for factors like age, income, education, sex, race--or even religion."

He quotes one liberal columnist who insists that the gap is a real reflection of the cultural differences between the left and the right in the country today. As the aforementioned columnist wrote,

"Maybe the scales are tipping to the neoconservative, homogenous right in our culture simply because they tend not to give much of a damn for the ramifications of wanton breeding and environmental destruction and pious sanctimony, whereas those on the left actually seem to give a whit for the health of the planet and the dire effects of overpopulation."

While I think the columnist's explanation is over the top, I do agree that there is a fundamental difference in how the left and the right look at the value of children. Call it "family values" or whatever you want, but conservatives generally think having a family i.e. lots of kids is not a bad thing.

I do think there is another factor that Brooks did not address that helps to explain the fertility gap. James Taranto at Best of the Web calls it the Roe Effect. In a nut shell the theory goes that...

"since those who favor legal abortion are much more likely to get one than those who oppose it, and since children often follow their parents' political leanings, support for legal abortions will decline over time, simply because pro-choice parents will have fewer children than they might otherwise have had. Since people frequently associate their views with political parties, those parties that oppose abortion, such as conservative parties, including the Republican Party, could gain power over time" (source wikipedia.org).

The fertility gap helps to explain why the democrats are working so hard to court favor with immigrants because that seems to be the one area where they might experience actual growth.