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, America is divided between "red" [Republican] and "blue" [Democratic] states. That partisan divide, however, points to a more personal divide--between those states with high fertility rates and those with rates falling even below the replacement level.
According to Sailer, "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 babies than the white people in Democratic-voting regions. The more kids whites have, the more pro-Bush they get." Sailer focused upon Caucasian voters, because these represent both the focus and the energy in the arguments over the red-blue division. Though other factors may well account for voting patterns among non-white ethnic groups, the red-blue divide hinges on the voting patterns of the dominant population.
The baby gap is a major factor on the electoral map, even though most observers have missed the issue entirely. Sailer focuses on the "total fertility rate," an estimate of the total number of children the average woman is likely to bear during her childbearing years. As Sailer reports, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that for 2002 the average white woman was giving birth at a fertility rate of 1.83. That's thirteen percent below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman.
Nevertheless, the states represent very different reproduction patterns. The highest level of fertility among whites is found in Utah, the only state where Bush received over 70 percent of the vote. Women there average 2.45 babies compared to only 1.11 babies in Washington, D.C., where Bush received only nine percent of the vote.
Sailer summarized the correlation between fertility rates and voting patterns in the 2004 election. "The three New England states where Bush won less than 40 percent--Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island--are three of the four states with the lowest white birthrates, with little Rhode Island dipping below 1.5 babies per woman." On the other hand, "Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility (just as he did in 2000), and 25 out of the top 26, with highly unionized Michigan being the one blue exception to the rule." Sailer went on to identify West Virginia, North Dakota, and Florida as the red states reporting lower fertility rates.
Kerry won all sixteen states at the bottom of the fertility list, and the states Sailer correctly identifies as the "Democrats' anchor states" (California and New York) reported fertility rates of only 1.65 and 1.72, respectively.
Does this really amount to a significant electoral impact? Sailer responds with a quick argument that underlines the importance of the fertility factor: "You could predict 74 percent of the variation in Bush's shares just from knowing each state's white fertility rate. When the average fertility goes up by a tenth of a child, Bush's share normally goes up by 4.5 points." That represents a hugely significant demographic factor with an immediate political impact.
Just as Sailer's cover article in The American Conservative appeared, David Brooks addressed the same issue in his op-ed column published in The New York Times. Writing in the December 7, 2004 edition of the paper, Brooks addressed "the new red-diaper babies." Though the old "red-diaper babies" were the offspring of American communists, the new babies Brooks has noticed are those born to parents in Republican-leaning states.
