January 17, 2005

Pundits, political scientists, and observers of various stripes have been working hard to explain just what happened on November 2. The results of the election are clear enough by now, but the meaning of the election is still hotly debated.

Various demographic trends, moral issues, and social trends have been offered as explanations for America's voting patterns. Missing from most of these discussions is something very obvious, very important and very controversial-the "baby gap."

Writing in The American Conservative, Steve Sailer identifies the baby gap as the factor almost no one mentions, even though the baby gap is "correlated uncannily with states' partisan splits in both 2000 and 2004."  

In other words, those states with the highest birth rates went for President Bush in a big way.  Those with the lowest birth rates were solidly in the Kerry column.

A coincidence?  Not hardly.  It's not hard to understand why those who are building young families are most concerned with family values.  

I'm Albert Mohler.

Beyond The News Commentaries, produced daily by Salem Communications, bring concise and penetrating insight to everything from the current headlines to challenges facing the church, from our culture wars to the Middle East conflict and from Hollywood to Washington, D.C. These daily features cover politics, culture, religion and science with perspective from the sharpest minds in the Christian and conservative world today: David Aikman, Terry Eastland, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Albert Mohler, Dennis Prager and Janet Parshall.