December 19, 2024 - Finally, Patrick T. Brown noted in an earlier IFS blog post that Republican counties do not significantly differ from Democratic counties in the proportion of babies born to married parents, contrary to years past. So, while Republican counties have higher fertility rates, these babies are not necessarily being born into more stable families. Nonetheless, the growing fertility divide has important political implications. Republicans live in areas where families are larger, and where more voters would directly benefit from policies like the Child Tax Credit.

June 20, 2025 - The birth gap between the states that voted Republican and Democratic in the past presidential election has fallen from about 475,000 births in 2015 to approximately 294,000 births in 2023.

When we compare Republican to Democratic-leaning counties in Figure 3 we find some · evidence that relative Democratic fertility falls, with an average quarterly effect of 0.087 · births per 1,000 women (0.6% of the 1999 average birth rate).

May 25, 2022 - The use of state controls (and some robustness tests I ran in large states with many counties) suggests this effect isn’t driven by unique features of states: within Red states or Blue states, and controlling for county racial and ethnic characteristics and population densities, Republican counties have higher birth rates. This is particularly astonishing given that Democrats perform very well in counties with many Hispanic and black voters, who have higher birth rates than non-Hispanic white Americans (and indeed, the more non-Hispanic whites in a county, the lower its birth rate in my models).

February 20, 2025 - Over the past three decades, Republicans have generally given birth to more kids than Democrats have. But during those first years of the first Trump administration, the partisan birth gap widened by 17 percent.

April 27, 2022 - The paper’s authors find that this difference between Republican versus Democratic babies conceived in the first two years of the Trump presidency amounts to between 1 and 2% of the national birth rate.

October 30, 2024 - The birth gap between the states that voted Republican and Democratic in the past presidential election has fallen from about 475,000 births in 2015 to approximately 294,000 births in 2023.

November 18, 2020 - The use of state controls (and some robustness tests I ran in large states with many counties) suggests this effect isn’t driven by unique features of states: within Red states or Blue states, and controlling for county racial and ethnic characteristics and population densities, Republican counties have higher birth rates. This is particularly astonishing given that Democrats perform very well in counties with many Hispanic and black voters, who have higher birth rates than non-Hispanic white Americans (and indeed, the more non-Hispanic whites in a county, the lower its birth rate in my models).

October 7, 2024 - Republicans are going to outnumber Democrats in the next generation simply because of the higher birth rate in Red states.

April 24, 2025 - For example, in 2007, 56% of voters without a degree were Democrats or leaned Democratic, while 42% were Republicans or GOP leaners. This group was narrowly divided between the two parties for most of the next 15 years, but in the last few years ...

birth rates between 1940 and 1980 was driven at first by the Republican Party’s · “Southern Strategy,” and later by the party’s focus on culture war issues. It will discuss · how the Republican Party gained support among white parents during the 1950s and ‘60s · amidst the battle over school desegregation, and how the GOP retained their support after · that battle ended by pivoting to a “family values” platform in the 1970s. It then suggests · that the Fertility Gap declined from 1980 and 2000 due to the growing population of · Hispanic-Americans, as Hispanics have a high birth rate and vote heavily Democratic. The chapter then proposes that the Fertility Gap rebounded in 2004 due to increased · Republican outreach to evangelical voters. Finally, the thesis discusses how Trump’s · performance in 2016 highlights the growing discrepancy in GOP support in states with ·

August 15, 2024 - It is true that birth rates have declined significantly in the U.S.—although ours remain higher than those in many other Western and wealthy nations. But the reasons why fewer Americans are having children, and the ways in which we should think about it, are complex and myriad.

July 8, 2022 - “The gap is actually 41 percent.” Data on the U.S. birth rate from the General Social Survey confirms this trend — a random sample of 100 conservative adults will raise 208 children, while 100 liberal adults will raise a mere 147 kids.

September 18, 2025 - The top 20% of counties that voted for Harris had a TFR of 1.37. State-level data reveals a similar relationship between partisanship and fertility. Democratic states have much lower fertility rates than Republican states.

Relative to Democratic counties, this amounts to roughly 23,000 · more births to mothers in Republican counties in the year following the election.

December 19, 2024 - I believe women’s education is a high predictor of tfr, and democrats are significantly more educated right now. ... That used to be the case, but it has changed now. American women with graduate degrees have more children than women with a high school diploma or less. Groups that used to have lots of children (poor people and those with less education) have seen their birth rates collapse.

November 22, 2024 - “Republican states (those that Trump won in 2020) generally have markedly higher fertility rates than Democratic ones (those that Biden won), suggesting that more men and women feel confident about starting and raising families in red states ...