Some studies show that residents of red states have more children than residents of blue states. A new report from a Conservative group says this could have political and cultural implications.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Does being more conservative mean having more children? Some studies show that residents of red states have more children than residents of blue states. And now a new report from a conservative group argues it could have implications for politics and culture in the US in the future. NPR political correspondent Sarah McCammon has been following this and joins us now. Hi all.
SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: Hi, Juana.
SUMMERS: Hello. So Sarah, start by telling us what the relationship is between where people are on the political spectrum and the number of children they have?
MCCAMMON: Yes. As such, several studies in recent years have pointed to higher birth rates in red states, and this is especially true in the wake of the COVID pandemic. Now a new report from the conservative-leaning Institute for Family Research claims that young people who consider themselves conservative are having more children than their liberal counterparts. Brad Wilcox is a senior fellow at the institute and co-author of the report.
BRAD WILCOX: You know, this has clear implications, potentially for everything from public schools to congressional districts and, again, to sort of the trajectory of the country, politically and otherwise.
MCCAMMON: And these authors looked at young people between the ages of 25 and 35 who identify as liberal or conservative. They found that young liberal women today are much less likely to have children than young conservative women, a gap of more than 30 percentage points. And that's a big change from the 1980s, when the gap between liberal and conservative women was much smaller.
SUMMERS: How much can birth rates in red or blue states predict how people will vote in the future?
MCCAMMON: The theory is that children are more likely to follow their parents, which means there will be more Republican voters in the future. But Melissa Deckman of the Institute for Social Research on Religion says that's not necessarily the case.
MELISSA DECMAN: It's clear that the states that got more votes for Trump are seeing increases in their child populations. But remember, these kids are not voters yet. And so if you're trying to guess how they'll vote 10, 20 years from now, I think it's really hard to come to the conclusion that it's going to benefit the Republican Party.
MCCAMMON: Deckman says another important variable is President Trump himself because he's such a unique political figure and it's unclear what direction either party will go in once he's no longer on the scene.
SUMMERS: Do we know why young conservatives might have 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 greater religiosity and having larger families. So this could be the reason. The authors of a new report say conservatives prioritize marriage and family in a way they say liberals do not. Leslie Root, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, said the partisan differences are real, but she said the report doesn't take into account many women who decide to have children later.
LESLIE RUTH: And so I do think that looking at this small group of people between the ages of 25 and 35 plays into the narrative that there are huge and growing inequalities that I think aren't really true.
MCCAMMON: And by the end of their childbearing years, she says, most women across the political spectrum end up having children. So this is a data point. This is an interesting and important question, but it is still an open question what the relationship between fertility rates and political ideology will mean for U.S. policy in the long term.
SUMMERS: NPR's Sarah McCammon, thank you very much.
MCCAMMON: Thank you.
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