The single most useful and understandable birthrate measure is the “total fertility rate.” This estimates, based on recent births, how many children the average woman currently in her childbearing years will have. The National Center for Health Statistics reported that in 2002 the average white woman was giving birth at a pace consistent with having 1.83 babies during her lifetime, or 13 percent below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. This below-replacement level has not changed dramatically in three decades.
States, however, differ significantly in white fertility. The most fecund whites are in heavily Mormon Utah, which, not coincidentally, was the only state where Bush received over 70 percent. White women average 2.45 babies in Utah compared to merely 1.11 babies in Washington, D.C., where Bush earned but 9 percent. 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.
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. (The least prolific red states are West Virginia, North Dakota, and Florida.)
In sharp contrast, Kerry won the 16 states at the bottom of the list, with the Democrats’ anchor states of California (1.65) and New York (1.72) having quite infertile whites....
While the Christian Right in Kansas doesn’t much hold with Darwin, they are doing well at the basic Darwinian task of reproducing themselves: pro-life Kansas has the fourth-highest white fertility in the country at 2.06 babies per woman, and the birthrate of the conservative Republicans that Frank finds so baffling is likely to be even higher. On the crucial question of whether a group can be bothered not to die out, “What’s the Matter with Massachusetts?” would be a more pertinent question. Massachusetts’s whites are failing to replace themselves, averaging only 1.6 babies per woman, and the state’s liberal Democrats are probably reproducing even less than that.....
To understand what’s driving this huge political phenomenon, you have to think like a real-estate shopper, not like an intellectual....
Singles often move to cities because the density of other singles makes them good places to become unsingle. But singles, especially women, generally vote Democratic. ... The celebrated gender gap is, in truth, largely a marriage gap among women.
Couples attempting to raise children in a big blue city quickly learn ... “If you want to live in New York, you’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate.” Manhattan liberals all believe in celebrating diversity in theory but typically draw the line at subjecting their own offspring to it in the public schools. With Manhattan private K-12 school tuitions now approaching $25,000, insulating multiple children rapidly becomes too expensive for all but the filthy rich....
Having insulated themselves through distance rather than money, they (Red-staters) can now send their kids to public schools....
And mom won’t have to chauffeur the kids everywhere because traffic and crime are light enough that they can ride their bikes.
With more children, the couple will have less money per child to buy insulation from America’s corrosive media culture, so they are likely to look to the government for help. Typically, red-region parents don’t ask for much, often just for quasi-symbolic endorsements of family values, the non-economic gestures that drive Thomas Frank crazy. But there’s nothing irrational about trying to protect and guide your children. ...
Focusing on children, insulation, and population density reveals that blue-region white Democrats’ positions on vouchers, gun control, and environmentalism are motivated partly by fear of urban minorities.
In 2001, the Wall Street Journal’s favorite mayor, Brett Schundler, ran for governor of New Jersey on a platform of vouchers to help inner-city children attend better schools in the suburbs. The now notorious Democrat Jim McGreevey beat him badly because white suburban moderates shunned this Republican who put the welfare of urban minority children ahead of their own. These homeowners were scraping together big mortgage payments precisely to get their kids into exclusive suburban school districts insulated from what they saw as the ghetto hellions that Schundler hoped to unleash on their children. They had much of their net worths tied up in their homes, and their property values depended on the local public schools’ high test scores, which they feared wouldn’t survive an onslaught of slum children. So they voted Democratic to keep minorities in their place.
The endless gun-control brouhaha, which on the surface appears to be a bitter battle between liberal and conservative whites, also features a cryptic racial angle. What blue-region white liberals actually want is for the government to disarm the dangerous urban minorities that threaten their children’s safety. Red-region white conservatives, insulated by distance from the Crips and the Bloods, don’t care that white liberals’ kids are in peril. Besides, in sparsely populated Republican areas, where police response times are slow and the chances of drilling an innocent bystander are slim, guns make more sense for self-defense than in the cities and suburbs.
White liberals, angered by white conservatives’ lack of racial solidarity with them, yet bereft of any vocabulary for expressing such a verboten concept, pretend that they need gun control to protect them from gun-crazy rural rednecks, such as the ones Michael Moore demonized in “Bowling for Columbine,” thus further enraging red-region Republicans.
Likewise, liberals in blue areas such as Northern California pioneer environmental restrictions on development in part to keep out illegal immigrants and other poor minorities. ...
OK, Gentle Readers, I've cut enough of this article to have probably unwittingly violated copyright laws (this sentence notwithstanding), so if you've read this far please at least click on the post by Mr. Sailer. Thanx.
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