Tough Luck, Liberals! Conservatives Just Have More Babies

In decades of teaching sociology in colleges, I have explained to students that the most important factors shaping societies are the least “sexy” or “glitzy.” One of these is demographics. It may be boring, but boy, it is powerful.

A king among these demographic vital statistics is plain vanilla fertility, especially in the context of death rates and life expectancy. Who is having more babies, and who is not? How many of them reach adulthood? Then, how long will they live?

I often talked about birth rates, especially within the context of growing elderly populations, as being a proverbial large boat that slowly crushes the dock. That is, small changes building over time lead to massive consequences. With fertility dropping and the aged population growing worldwide, especially in developed countries, we are already seeing this, which has, as the Carpenters sang, “only just begun.” (RELATED: Desired Fertility Is Too Low to Avoid Depopulation)

But some are doing much better in the fertility “arms race.” And to those who both have more babies and properly raise them, I would say, quoting my favorite Rudyard Kipling poem, “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.”

Nowhere is this truer than in this plain fact — in the United States, at least, conservatives are having more babies than liberals. A lot more. And this has been true for a long time. (RELATED: The Left Has a Baby Dilemma)

Yes, fertility is dropping for conservatives too. But they have declined the least. Within the last few weeks, this has become big news, mostly because of handwringing by pundits on the Left who, for some reason, have just figured out their steep relative demographic decline, and what this means for their political and cultural ambitions. (RELATED: What Will the US Do When Young People Begin to Disappear?)

This difference shows up no matter what angle you approach it from. Politicians, voters, geographic regions, and surveys.

I recently bumped into a 2022 PR Newswire article about children and U.S. Senators. Here is what they found: “The percentage of senators with zero or one child is 30 percent in the Democratic Party but only 14 percent in the Republican Party. On the other hand, Senators with four or more kids constitute only 8 percent in the Democratic Party and a whopping 26 percent in the Republican Party.”

Well, it turns out that it is not just politicians, but voters, who show this pattern of conservatives having more children. Last year, the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal published a piece about shockingly lower births in blue cities and suburbs, compared to more conservative locales. For example, one set of comparisons showed that blue cities had fertility rates that were from eight to 25 percent lower than red ones. And a San Francisco suburb was 57 percent lower than one “outside San Antonio.” The author aptly called this the “deep blue birth dearth.”

Most Americans live in cities or suburbs. Population numbers are tied to Congressional representation. Crashing populations are a massive roadblock to expansive progressive dreams in their precious blue cities and counties, since it all requires lots of tax revenue, which you get less of if you have, you know, fewer taxpayers. Good luck, Mamdani. Have fun, Brandon Johnson. See you later, Gavin.

So, this is a big deal. The political future belongs to the places having more babies, all other things being equal. (Wonder why Democrats want more illegal immigration and keep trying to sneak in ways for them to vote? Now you know.) Republican senators having more children is a curious fact, but Republican voters having more children is a potentially powerful force for change.

I am not sure progressives noticed much when the City Journal rang that bell last year. That is not surprising, since in the Leftist worldview, babies have not mattered much except for trying to figure out how to have fewer of them. (RELATED: UN Population Agency Seeks to Cover Up the Disaster They Wrought)

However, progressives did seem to notice when John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times published powerful research just this past August 29, demonstrating that, as he put it on X, “For all the talk of a general fall in births, the drop is overwhelmingly driven by people on the left having fewer kids.” His aim seemed to be scaring the bejesus out of the Left, frightening them into having more kids. To make sure they all got the point, his article was titled “Why Progressives Should Care About Falling Birth Rates.”

To make sure that even those unwilling to fork over $49 a month to subscribe to FT got the message, he gave the salient details on X, complete with a “scare the liberals” line chart which was reproduced just about everywhere by activists on both sides. It showed that, from being about the same in the late 1970s, birth rates had fallen like a drunk stumbling over a cliff for self-identified progressives, while dipping much, much less for those evil family types on the right. The gap between them now, he showed, is enormous.

On a lengthy thread on X, he delivered ominous warnings to his Leftish compatriots. “By ceding the topic of family and children to the right, progressives risk ushering in a more conservative world.” Yes, he agrees, “pro-natalism often implies constraining individual liberty and setting back women’s progress. As such, the left’s aversion to worrying about birth rates is perfectly natural.” Interpretation — kids might get in the way of what you want, so of course, you do not want to encourage having more of them. However, “the consequence of this emerging ideological slant in birth rates is that each successive generation gets nudged rightwards, increasing the likelihood that conservative politicians (who want to constrain individual liberty and set back women’s progress) get elected.” Scary, huh? Translated: “I know you do not want more babies, but if you do not start cranking them out now, the Right will take over, and then what will you do?”

Then, as if on cue, an article appeared a little over a month ago in the Institute for Family Studies, further documenting the Left’s demographic demise vis-à-vis the Right’s long-term population advantage. Drawing on their previous work, they began by reminding readers that in 2024, counties that had higher margins of victory for Harris had much lower fertility than those that similarly favored Trump. The same was true at the state level.

Looking further, the authors — Scott Yenor and Lyman Stone — examined what a large survey data set, including 2021 through 2025, showed them, this time comparing conservative with moderate and liberal women. They found that not only did conservative women have a lot more babies, but that they were more likely to both (a) get married (and younger too), and (b) want more children, having a larger “ideal family size.” Turns out getting married and actually wanting more babies means… more babies. Shocking, huh? This is how Yenor and Stone put it: “It turns out that conservative women don’t just have more children than liberal women; conservative women want more children than liberal women, and they’re likelier to marry, and to marry young enough to have more children.”

No wonder Burn-Murdoch is waking up with night sweats!

I like to check things out myself, and so I did, using the General Social Survey for the years 2021 through 2024 combined. I selected respondents between 35 and 50 years of age and included men and women, comparing the number of children by both party identification and political orientation.

Right in line with other research, it was clear that Republicans and conservatives have more children. The Democrats and “lean Democrats” were more than 1.6 times more likely than Republicans and “lean Republican” to be childless (26 versus 16 percent), and the Republicans were more than 1.4 times more likely to have three or more kids (34 versus 24 percent). Self-identified liberals were 2.3 times more likely than conservatives to be childless (32 versus 14 percent), and conservatives were 1.8 times more likely to have three or more (37 versus 21 percent). Moderates were in the middle throughout.

It is one of those straight lines we social scientists drool over. The further right you go, the more children you have.

The Institute for Family Studies had mentioned the importance of marriage, so I checked that too. Indeed, Republicans and conservatives were a lot more likely to be married, and married folk did have more kids. But when I compared the number of children for even married liberals versus conservatives, the results surprised me. Even among the married, conservatives were having more children. Married liberals were literally 3 times more likely to be childless (21 versus 7 percent), and married conservatives were 1.8 times more likely to have had three or more. Yes, if liberals get married, they have more kids, but as it turns out, so do married conservatives. More liberals getting married (and good luck with that) is not going to catch them up with conservatives in the baby department.

I also checked church attendance, which is normally associated with more children, too, as it was in my GSS data. Yup, liberals go to church a lot less. But even here, when I compared the number of children for both liberals and conservatives who attend church at least two to three times a month, there was still a huge gap. Regular church-going liberals were 2.4 times more likely to be childless (19 versus 8 percent), while their conservative counterparts were 1.2 times more likely to have one or two kids (52 versus 45 percent), although only a little more likely to have three or more kids (39 versus 36 percent). (Turns out that going to church a lot is associated heavily with having larger families. Go figure.)

For the coup de grace, I decided to compare liberals and conservatives who were both married and went to church at least two to three times per month. (You know, what most of the adult population back in the good old days did.) This was the closest thing to them being the same, but even here liberals were 2.3 times more likely to be childless (9 versus 4 percent), and conservatives were a bit more likely to have one or two (52 versus 47 percent). Three or more children, for those both married and regularly attending church, was a virtual tie (liberals at 43, conservatives at 44, percent).

Is it likely that Democrats will have more babies just because they want more voters 20 years from now than Republicans do? I kind of doubt it.

So, maybe Burn-Murdoch’s best hope is for progressives to both marry and “get religion” as much as conservatives, to at least get them closer. How about if they start promoting policies that encourage childbearing (like making abortion rare) and marriage (like making out-of-wedlock birth and divorce rarer, not endlessly putting off marriage, and so on), and running away from left-wing ideologies (like climate change hysteria, hyperventilating over belching cows, sterilizing girls who think they may be boys and vice versa, and so on) that discourages having kids? Start going to church as much as conservatives, sitting in pews next to MAGA voters without breaking out into hives? Get Planned Parenthood to focus on breast cancer detection instead of stopping pregnancies by any means necessary? Elect more high-profile Democrats with as many kids as Pete Hegseth?

Sure, why not? If liberals become more, well, conservative, they can catch up with… Oops, sorry, scratch that.

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