As if our culture weren’t already coming apart at the seams, there could be a new battle line emerging soon: Blue states seem to be trending toward childlessness while red states are becoming more fecund.
A future culture war that pits the parental class against the child-free class will not be pretty.
We’re not there yet — Democrats still have plenty of children, and Donald Trump’s rise has roped plenty of unmarried, childless men into the Republican Party. But every day, there are hints that we are heading in this direction.
“Parents are not generally moving towards states with the preferred family policies of progressives,” reported demographer Lyman Stone and sociologist Brad Wilcox in mid-September. “They are moving out of these states, including Democratic states, like New York, California, Massachusetts, and Oregon, all well known for their liberal family policies.”
Blue states, those that voted against Trump in the past two elections, lost 213,000 families in the past two years on record, while red states gained 181,000 families.
New York leads the nation in driving families away, with a 1.9% dip in the number of families over just two years. Idaho, meanwhile, saw a 2.3% increase in family population.
If parents weren’t turned off by the yearlong school closures and canceled Little League seasons in progressive paradises such as Brooklyn and Los Angeles, they might have been chased out by the youth crime waves that followed this forced isolation.
But family migration isn’t the only sign of coming apart here — the partisan valence is even stronger when it comes to birthrates. The 10 states with the highest birth rates all voted for Trump twice and all have Republican governors. The ten states with the lowest birth rates all voted against Trump twice and all have Democratic governors.
Drill down more locally, and it’s even starker. Parents in cities are grabbing their children and getting out, Connor O’Brien of the Economic Innovation Group found. “The country’s very largest cities have experienced shocking declines in their population of young children. The under-five population has fallen by 18 percent in New York City, 15 percent in Cook County, Illinois (Chicago), and 14 percent in Los Angeles County since 2020.”
Meanwhile, some in the liberal media are painting babymaking as a right-wing act of extremism. Politico recently ran a huge magazine story positing that only “the far Right” cares about low and falling birth rates.
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The long-term danger is this: Places with fewer children become less kid-friendly. City leaders in childless cities will not care about accommodations for parents. Blue state politicians today still speak to and for “families,” but will that be true if these trends continue for 30 years? Wouldn’t a child-free electorate elect leaders who drop all that old-fashioned “family” talk and speak directly to the unfettered autonomous individual?
We might soon have national politics pitting the child-free states against the childful states. That wouldn’t be good for anyone.