Are you curious about whether Democrats really are a party of childless cat ladies? We know that both women and cat owners are more likely to be Democrats, but how about childless people? Here you go:
Childlessness has gone way up among Democrats over the past three decades while it's gone down among Republicans. I'm pretty sure this is mostly because of declining religiosity among Dems and rising religiosity among Republicans, but I don't have access to the data in order to control for that and find out.
Whatever the reason, Democrats and Republicans used to have about the same number of kids, but that started to change in 2000 and the gap is now pretty big.
Is this because younger people are having few children, or just that younger people have fewer children?
college educated people have fewer children (because we can do basic math and expect to live longer enough to retire) and college educated people vote Democrat.
It is probably a combination. Plus people are waiting longer to have kids. Also there are a lot more young people who are Democrats.
could also be because dem women are more likely to start birth control at a younger age
Conservative states have higher teen birthrates than liberal states across all racial categories.
https://creativematter.skidmore.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=socio_stu_stu_schol
Democrats are better at using birth control than Republicans?
https://youtu.be/gJDcoqrh1ac?si=IEJXOcKEozsb-GSZ
You have to be able to read, comprehend what you read, and turn that comprehension into effective action. Those are tough hills for some Republicans.
What a stupid comment. Things like that are what got Trump elected in the first place.
Yea republicans being stupid is in fact what got trump elected. Excellent detective work there, dipshit.
Yes, elected Republican leaders calling for people like me to be killed is really the kind hand of tolerance and understanding slapped away by insults on liberal-leaning blogs.
Thanks to Republican leaders, it's time for us all to ask ourselves this question: Do I really suck so much that I and my children should be murdered?
Thanks for the insight.
Please provide a link to republican leaders calling for people to be killed.
Start with all those people who have outlawed abortion leading to more dead women and more dead babies. Move on to the Trump crime wave late in his term that Biden managed to get under control. Throw in the anti-semitc right wing goons Trump spoke of favorably. We all know Trump and his people's agenda. They'll lie about it when questioned, but their actions betray them. Some of us have learned from history.
So, nothing.
Do you have to work hard at being this obtuse or does it just come naturally?
Evidence?
Useful and interesting charts; one of the many reasons we come here. Thanks.
A quibble on the interpretation:
Three decades ago (1994) is an outlier for Republicans. If you start at 2000, then Republican childlessness is basically flat, with a slight uptick in the last available year of data.
I find this idea that somehow people who don't reproduce are less patriotic, less valuable, and deviant in some way to be an infuriating distraction. It's only been since birth control became widely available and the stigma was removed that people who just didn't want kids could also enjoy a sex life.
Have kids, don't have kids. The fact that anyone is making one side "better" than the other is a sign that they're out of rational arguments.
As a somewhat older but still child-bearing age person who happens to live in a red state, I'll also cop to some fury at the Vances of this world mocking childlessness--an added issue for my spouse and me is that, should a pregnancy of ours run into complications, doctors in our state would be terrified to terminate because our dear Republican government may well prosecute them.
So thank you very much, you fucker republicans, for forcing us to confront a reality that, in this year of our Lord 2024, us planning to have a child means contemplating maternal injury or death simply because Team Red has crippled vital reproductive care. While simultaneously suggesting our lack of biologic kiddos means we're somehow less American.
Is that right hand blue figure "36%" or "76%"?
Oh, I get it; never mind. It's the percent change, not just an annotation of the last data point.
The shift reflects changes to the base, from blue collar to college-educated.
That really doesn't say more families with kids are one or the other, though.
I hate these change charts, too. I can see slopes easily, but it's hard to visually integrate.
There are probably a lot of factors at play here, from religion to educational attainment to income. But I think a lot of it has to do with geographic sorting. Democrats tend to be concentrated in urban areas and costal enclaves where it's simply too expensive to have a large family, so you either don't have kids or just have one or -- at the most -- two.
Also, there are not a few millennial couples out there these days who are committed to remaining childless just because they can't in good conscience bring kids into a world so many conservatives are doing their best to destroy economically, ecologically, and ideologically.
Probably some selection bias in here, as mentioned in some other comments.
But there's also just the simple fact that having babies and furthering the (white) nation is Republican dogma and has been ever since they fully absorbed the anti-abortion movement decades ago. Republican voter types are less likely to decide they can't afford a kid and therefore won't have one, or that bringing a kid into a shitty world is not something they should do, than Democratic voter types. Republicans either don't see those as problems or ignore them and have kids anyway, because it's their tribal duty.
To an extent, they are outbreeding us. Even though you can't control how your child will end up politically, it's a "pro" in the pro/con columns for us - we think our kid would be more likely to be not-conservative, and somebody's gotta outvote them.
Yes, all those inner city unwed mothers carefully weigh the economic impact of having children. Or maybe you are saying they are all republicans?
Pause while I fire up the Republican translator app . . . .
Ah, here we go: "inner city unwed mothers" means "black women on welfare."
Correct. And let me break out my Democrat translator app.
Ah, here we go: "Republican voter types are less likely to decide they can't afford a kid" means "white rural women on welfare".
What a moron you are.
They've been having a lot fewer kids lately. Maybe they are all making rational decisions.
Evidence?
I wonder how much of this has to do with rates of single motherhood. (Does "family" here mean married parents, as it does for income measures, or is it just "related people"?)
It's not wrong to think of Democrats as centrally the party of unmarried women, and Republicans as centrally the party of 2-parent families with children. I think I'm remembering correctly that rates of childbirth to unmarried women have gone down fairly dramatically over the last couple decades.
Democrats are not the part of unmarried women. They are the party of people who expect certain freedoms like right to make their own reproductive decisions, marry or have intimacy with whomever they choose, worship (or not) the entity of their choice, and express their gender as they choose. They also are the party that idealizes raising people up from poverty by providing opportunity vs telling them to bootstrap their lazy asses.
I think you'd have a stretch to say that Republicans are the party of two parent families, given the poverty and unwed mother rate in white communities that vote solidly Republican.
I can't shake the idea that age (and self-sorting?) is big factor here. If the democratic party appeals to younger voters, then one would expect more childless because fewer young families have had children than older, more established families. That is unavoidable. Further more ANY shift in the age at which people have children is by definition going to show-up far more on the Democrat's side than the Republicans for the same reasons.
If this were controlled for age AND showed the NUMBER of children, it would be a far more useful chart, Not as useful as a chart showing the actual rates of single-female-cat-owners of course 😀
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