August 23, 2006

U.S. Republicans Winning the Baby War

A segment on Good Morning America this morning exposed the baby gap between Democrats and Republicans. Apparently, Republicans are having significantly more babies than Democrats and the natalist tendencies of Republicans may tip the balance of power for decades to come unless Democrats step up to the plate and have more kids.

Looking back on the 2004 election, The American Conservative contributor Steven Sailer noted in his article Baby Gap :

"…voters are picking their parties based on differing approaches to the most fundamentally important human activity: having babies. The white people in Republican-voting regions consistently have more children than the white people in Democratic-voting regions. The more kids whites have, the more pro-Bush they get."

Why?

R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary writing for the Christian Post came to the conclusion that "the responsibilities, experiences, and disciplines of parenthood--along with a parent's obvious concern for the future--tend to move child-rearing voters to the right."

Apparently if you are white and American, the more kids you have the more likely you are to vote for Republican candidates.

A Democrat featured in the Good Morning America segment urges her fellow Democrats to make babies so that we can close the gap. The rationale being that we tend to vote how our parents vote.

With all the other pressures of being a parent, now you’re being asked to vote with your womb??

Another reason I’m happy to be a childfree independent.

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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow. That's just downright scary...

twiga92 said...

What the ??? There's just so many assumptions in that argument. Nobody can say how a kid is going to turn out. You cannot predict it. That's just a very stupid reason to have kids.
In my opionion, that is. :-)

Anonymous said...

Laura, Twiga and Tanja --
My first thought was...I do not vote the way my parents did, i.e.: along the same party line. Then I went online and found a paper about forecasting the relationship between birth rates and future voter oucomes, and it doesn't even mention this as a flaw. Probably because it's too obvious!

The projections are instead a "best guess" calculation hinged upon whether future voters will look back or forwards at a party's performance to determine their vote. I didn't find any mention of "% of offspring that vote the way their parents did", though I am sure someone has researched it. (Not me, I don't have all day!)

I find that particular assumption a little insulting to the young people being raised today. Parents work hard to make them independent thinkers.

Having babies as a patriotic duty is a bunch of hogwash.

RE ABC link: news clips (video) age very quickly and go off the front page of their site next day. I could not find this story, no matter how I searched on their site. The other links are fine - takes you right to the article.

While is was there, I couldn't help notice how many stories related to parents or kids. They were catering the majority for sure:

Consumer Mom
American Family (all mentioned grads, kids, teens, etc.)
Talk to Us (top story mentioned parents)
Moms Make it to Work
Pain in the Pump (gosh, for a minute I thought this was about breast-feeding!)

Maybe these headers were reaching out to Purple Women:

Working 9-5 (yeah, right)
Sensible Shopper (hey, that could include moms...)

Robin said...

Ok, that's a really scary concept thinking decades from now most of the voters will be conservative.

Anonymous said...

that's just scary on many levels.
First, it brings to mind the old Romanian regime where women were forced to "bear workers for the state"
Secondly, the thought of subsequent generations becoming more coservative is just frightening in and of itself, and finally,
Women need to think and vote with their brain, not their uterus. The suggestion of women entering a breeding race along party lines has set humankind back to the stone age.