The Coming Democratic Baby Bust
Birth rates on the left fell in the last Trump presidency. That seems likely to happen againBy Kristen V.1/2 or 3
YES, YES, YES
Donald Trump’s first term saw a great deal of political polarization. Right- and left-leaning Americans disagreed about environmental regulation and immigration. They disagreed about vaccines and reproductive rights. And they disagreed about whether or not to have children: As Republicans started having more babies under Trump, the birth rate among Democrats fell dramatically.
A few years ago, Gordon Dahl, an economist at UC San Diego, set out to measurehow Trump’s 2016 victory might have affected conception ratesin the years following. And he and his colleagues found a clear effect:Starting after Trump’s election, through the end of 2018, 38,000 fewer babies than would otherwise be expected were conceived in Democratic counties.
By contrast, 7,000 more than expected were conceived in Republican counties in that same period. (The study, published in 2022, was conducted before data on the rest of Trump’s term were available.) 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. “You see a clear and undeniable shift in who’s having babies,” Dahl told me.
That isn’t to say 38,000 couples took one look at President Trump and decided, Nope, no baby for us! But the correlation that Dahl’s team found was clear and strong. The researchers also hypothesized that George W. Bush’s win in 2000, another close election, would have had a noticeable effect on fertility rates. And they found that after that election, too, the partisan fertility gap widened, although less dramatically than after the 2016 election. According to experts I spoke with, as the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans has grown, so has the influence of politics on fertility.In Trump’s second term, America may be staring down another Democratic baby bust.👏
Dahl’s paper suggested a novel idea:Perhaps shifts in political power can influence fertility rates as much as, say, the economy does. This one paper only goes so far: Dahl and his co-authors found evidence for a significant shift in birth rates only in elections that a Republican won; for the 2008 election, they found no evidence that Barack Obama’s victory affected fertility rates. (They suggest in the paper, though, that the intense economic impact of the Great Recession might have drowned out any partisan effect.)
And the study looked only at those three elections; little other research has looked so directly at the impact of American presidential elections on partisan birth rates. But plenty of studies have found that political stability, political freedom, and political transitions all affect fertility. To researchers like Dahl, this growing body of work suggests that the next four years might follow similar trends.
In the U.S., partisan differences in fertility patterns have existed since the mid-1990s. Today, in counties that lean Republican, people tend to have bigger families and lower rates of childlessness; in places that skew Democratic, families tend to be smaller.
And according to an analysis by the Institute for Family Studies, a right-leaning research group, places that tiltmore Republican have become associated with even higher fertility rates over the past 12 years. “I don't think there’s any reason to think that’s about to stop,” Lyman Stone, a demographer with the institute, told me.
That Democrats might choose to have fewer babies under a Republican president, and perhaps vice versa, may seem intuitive.
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