Crossroads -- Democrats need to start having babies

This fertility issue has both political and religious (#DUH) implications

I have to admit that a recent headline in The Atlantic made me laugh out loud.

Readers need to see the whole thing in order to understand why this political story was a logical hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast. Here goes: “The Coming Democratic Baby Bust — Birth rates on the left fell in the last Trump presidency. That seems likely to happen again.”

Wait a minute. President Donald Trump is why birthrates have been falling for decades in many niches on the left, while rising in key camps on the moral, cultural, religious right?

Let’s see. How would social scientists, looking at 2024 poll data, describe a large percentage of Democratic Party voters in deep-blue zip codes? Let’s focus on white voters, since issues among Blacks and Latinos are very different (and seem to be changing in the past few elections). Choose one or more (or all) of the accurate labels: “White,” “urban,” “highly educated,” “rich” and often “single.” What percentage of the female singles vote did Kamala Harris win?

Many people would add “secular” to that list — but that’s simplistic. Still, decades of “pew gap” numbers (I started following this trend in the 1980s) show that the more voters frequent sanctuary pews, the more likely they are to support culturally conservative candidates.

But there are white Democrats in pews. Honest! But let’s frame the question this way: Who is more likely to have more than two children, someone who is a Unitarian or a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? How about, Episcopalians or Southern Baptists? Maybe the “religiously unaffiliated” vs. nondenominational Protestants and charismatics? Reform Jews or Orthodox Jews? Progressive Catholics or pro-Catechism Catholics?

Now, hold that thought. Here is the overture for the faith-free Atlantic feature:

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 measure how Trump's 2016 victory might have affected conception rates in 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.

But this is a new, Trump-related political phenomenon?

Later, there is this:

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.

Nice to know. Now, here is the faith-free thesis:

If Democrats' drops in fertility over the coming years do again outstrip Republican gains, that trend will worsen a broader issue the U.S. is facing: a countrywide baby bust. The fertility rate has been falling for almost a decade, save for a brief pandemic baby boom. Around the world, falling birth rates have set off anxieties about how societies might handle, for instance, the challenge of an aging population with few younger people to care for them.

Let me stress that this is a valid political-beat story. If you want more background, see this feature from the Institute for Family Studies: “The Trump Bump: The Republican Fertility Advantage in 2024.” The headline mentions Trump, but the information is much deeper than that.

The bottom line: There is no accurate way to cover these issues without including research into DECADES of statistics linked to faith and family.

I have been looking at this “religion ghost” situation for quite some time now, mainly at the old GetReligion website. Here is one example: “New York Times still ignoring religion ghosts in 'demographic winter' trends.”

That article contains a perfect statement of the pre-Trump realities ignored, for the most part, by many political-beat journalists. It’s from a Weekly Standard (RIP) feature from 2010: “America’s One-Child Policy.”

This is hard-edged and still relevant. The last sentence is perfect:

... In a world where childbearing has no practical benefit, people have babies because they want to, either for self-fulfillment or as a moral imperative. "Moral imperative," of course, is a euphemism for "religious compulsion." There are stark differences in fertility between secular and religious people.

The best indicator of actual fertility is "aspirational fertility" – the number of children men and women say they would like to have. Gallup has been asking Americans about their "ideal family size" since 1936. When they first asked the question, 64 percent of Americans said that three or more children were ideal; 34 percent said that zero, one, or two children were ideal. Today only 34 percent of Americans think that a family with three-or-more children is ideal.

But on this question there are two Americas today: a secular population that wants small families (or no family at all) and a religious population that wants larger families.

Religious affiliation is part of the story, but the real difference comes with church attendance. Among people who seldom or never go to church, 66 percent say that zero, one, or two children is the ideal family size, and only 25 percent view three-or-more children as ideal. Among those who go to church monthly, the three-or-more number edges up to 29 percent. But among those who attend church every week, 41 percent say three or more children is ideal, while only 47 percent think that a smaller family is preferable. When you meet couples with more than three children today, chances are they're making a cultural and theological statement.

Wait a minute. The Gallup Organization has been asking the “ideal family” question since the 1930s?

That’s amazing. I mean, Donald Trump wasn’t even born until 1946.

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