Although I don’t share Joel Kotkin’s view that Republicans have “Medievalist views” about society, I am fascinated with a phenomenon Kotkin wrote about earlier this month: regions with the largest percentages of childless women are overwhelmingly likely to vote Democratic.
Kotkin cites fascinating democraphic evidence of this trend, including an analysis of the 2008 election that showed that states with the highest percentages of women under 45 who don’t have children are the bluest in the nation. “Child-free regions,” in fact, were almost 85% more likely to have supported the Democratic ticket that year.
The District of Columbia, with 80 percent of its women under 45 childless, tops the list as the bluest voting entity in the U.S. The highest percentages of “offspring free” women are to be found in Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Vermont and California—all blue bastions.
Child-bearing states, such as Mississippi, Idaho, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Arkansas, traditionally go red. Cities with the lowest percentages of childless women, such as Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio, Houston, Salt Lake City, and Memphis, also go Republican.
We at IWF have long been interested in the way women vote. Single women are more likely to vote for big government programs, under the erroneous belief that they get a “free” safety net that in some ways supplies what families did in the past.
As women have seen the costs of big government programs in recent years, both to our pocketbooks and in a sluggish economy, the gender gap (a term that just means that women skewed Democratic) has begun to shrink. For the first time in decades, it was negligible in the 2010 midterm elections.
Nevertheless Democrats, according to the Kotkin piece, do draw their strength from “childless” regions. The impact of these demographics could be profound:
"The increasing role of the childless may already be shifting the Democratic Party toward the kind of post-familalistic secularism generally associated with Europe or parts of East Asia. This could partly explain why the Obama Administration has been so willing to challenge the Catholic Church — a traditional home to many working class Democrats — on the issue of offering contraception to its employees. Simply put, in Democratic calculations, secular singletons may now outweigh religious Catholic Democrats. "
Interestingly—and logically—the childbearing regions may have the last word. Obviously, that’s because they’ll end up with the larger populations.
" Childless singletons may be riding high now, he writes, but as non-breeders their influence ends with their own lifespans."
To win the future, according to Democratic activists and millennial chroniclers Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, Democrats must all appeal to the next generation of families. Many of today’s childless millennials are still under 30 and plan to have kids. Reflecting their own experience with divorce as children, 50% consider being a good parent their highest priority in life. A strong plurality also see themselves ending up in the suburbs.
That means Democrats could pay a big price for disdaining homemakers, the often unaesthetic chores of child-raising and particularly suburbia, because that’s precisely the place where many of today’s urban millennials will likely end up in the next decade. END QUOTE
Interesting, isn’t it, that our elites have such disdain for homemakers and “the often unaesthetic chores of child raising,” chores that most of us consider worthy of honor?