Birth rates on the left fell in the last Trump presidency. That seems likely to happen again.
Donald Trump’s first term saw a great deal of political polarization. Right- and left-leaning Americans disagreed about environmental regulation and immigration. They disagreed about vaccines and reproductive rights. **And they disagreed about whether or not to have children: As Republicans started having more babies under Trump, the birth rate among Democrats fell dramatically**.
A few years ago, Gordon Dahl, an economist at UC San Diego, set out to measure how Trump’s 2016 victory might have affected conception rates in the years following. And he and his colleagues found a clear effect: **Starting after Trump’s election, through the end of 2018, 38,000 fewer babies than would otherwise be expected were conceived in Democratic counties. By contrast, 7,000 more than expected were conceived in Republican counties in that same period**. (The study, published in 2022, was conducted before data on the rest of Trump’s term were available.) *Over the past 3 decades, Republicans have generally given birth to more kids than Democrats* have. But during those **first years of the first Trump administration, the partisan birth gap widened by 17%. “You see a clear and undeniable shift in who’s having babies,” Dahl told** me.
That isn’t to say 38,000 couples took one look at President Trump and decided, Nope, no baby for us! But the correlation that Dahl’s team found was clear and strong. The researchers *also hypothesized that George W. Bush’s win in 2000, another close election, would have had a noticeable effect on fertility* rates. And they found that **after that election, too, the partisan fertility gap widened, although less dramatically** than after the 2016 election.
# According to experts I spoke with, as the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans has grown, so has the influence of politics on fertility. In Trump’s second term, America may be staring down another Democratic baby bust.
Dahl’s paper suggested a novel idea: Perhaps shifts in political power can influence fertility rates as much as, say, the economy does. This one paper only goes so far: Dahl and his co-authors found evidence for a significant shift in birth rates only in elections that a Republican won; for the 2008 election, they found **no evidence that Barack Obama’s victory affected fertility** rates. (They suggest in the paper, though, that the intense economic impact of the Great Recession might have drowned out any partisan effect.) And the study looked only at those 3 elections; little other research has looked so directly at the impact of American presidential elections on partisan birth rates. But *plenty of studies have found that political stability, politcal freedom and political transitions all affect fertility*. To researchers like Dahl, this growing body of work **suggests that the next 4 years might follow similar trends**.
In the U.S., **partisan differences in fertility patterns have existed since the mid-1990s**. Today, in counties that lean Republican, people tend to have bigger families and lower rates of childlessness; in places that skew **Democratic, families tend to be smaller**. And according to an analysis by the Institute for Family Studies, a right-leaning research group, places that tilt more **Republican have become associated with even higher fertility rates over the past 12 years**. “I don’t think there’s any reason to think that’s about to stop,” Lyman Stone, a demographer with the institute, told me.
That Democrats might choose to have fewer babies under a Republican president, and perhaps vice versa, may seem intuitive. People take into account a lot of factors when they’re deciding to have kids, including the economy and their readiness to parent.
# “People are not just looking at the price of eggs,” Sarah Hayford, the director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University, told me.
**They also consider more subjective factors**, such as their own well-being, their feelings about the state of society, and their confidence (or lack thereof) in political leadership. Trump’s supporters may feel more optimistic than ever about the future, but his detractors feel otherwise. After a few short weeks in office, the president has already announced withdrawals from the Paris Agreement on climate change and the World Health Organization, and paused funding for a slew of government services. Those include child-care-assistance programs, although the administration has promised to support policies to encourage family growth. “**If you’re a Democrat** and you really care about child care and family leave and climate change,” Dahl said, you might conclude that “**this is maybe not the right time to bring a kid** into the world.”
Some would-be parents aren’t just worried about the world they might bring a child into they’re worried about themselves, too. In 2016, *Roe v. Wade* still protected Americans’ right to an abortion. Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe, states across the country have enacted abortion bans. In some cases, those bans have meant that pregnant women have had to wait for care, or be airlifted to other states; as a direct result, at least 5 pregnant American women have died. These risks can weigh heavily. After the election, Planned Parenthood locations across the country saw a **surge in appointments for birth control and vasectomies**.
Brittany, a labor-and-delivery nurse in North Carolina, told me that she and her husband had decided to try for one more kid she wanted a girl, after 3 boys, but after Trump was reelected, she changed her mind. (Brittany requested that I not use her last name, in order to protect her medical privacy.) During her first pregnancy, when she nearly lost her uterus to a severe postpartum hemorrhage, doctors stopped the bleeding with the help of a device that can also be used in abortions. *Emergency abortion is legal in North Carolina, but Brittany fears* that could change or that doctors might become more wary about using those same tools to save her reproductive organs or even her life under an administration that has signaled support for anti-abortion groups. Brittany is 37 now, and not optimistic about her chances of getting pregnant in 4 years, when Trump is out of office. Her husband, who voted for Trump, “thinks that I’m kind of blowing things out of proportion when I say we’re definitely not having another baby because of this administration,” she said. For her, though, it seemed like the only rational choice.
If **Democrats’ drops in fertility over the coming years** do again outstrip Republican gains, that trend will worsen a broader issue the U.S. is facing: a countrywide baby bust. The fertility rate has been falling for almost a decade, save for a brief pandemic baby boom. Around the world, falling birth rates have set off anxieties about how societies might handle, for instance, the challenge of **an aging population with few younger people to care for them**. In the U.S., fears about population collapse also have **helped unite conservatives with the techno-libertarians** who have recently flocked to Trump’s inner orbit. Elon **Musk, who has 12 children**, has repeatedly claimed that population collapse is a bigger threat than climate change. At the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., last month, Vice President J. D. Vance told the crowd, “I want more babies in the United States of America.”
**So far, no country** has hit on the magic public policy that will reverse population decline. **Taiwan** introduced more paid family leave, along with cash benefits and tax credits for parents of young kids. **Russia, Italy, and Greece** have all tried paying people to have kids. **Japan** has tried an **everchanging list** of incentives for some **30 years**, among them subsidized child care, shorter work hours, and cash.
#None of it has worked.
Vance favors expanding the child tax credit; the Trump administration has also sent early signals of family-first policies, including a memo instructing the Department of Transportation to preferentially direct grants and services toward communities with high marriage and birth rates.
As Musk and Vance fight against population decline, they could entice enough Americans to have kids that they can counteract a Democratic deficit, or even reverse falling birth rates. But that won’t be easy.
# “There may be a Trump bump in conservative places and a Trump bust in liberal places,” Stone told me. “I would bet on the dip being bigger.”
Agent2255 on
This is an under-discussed reality that’s going to bite democrats down the line. Honestly, the cultural anti-natalist attitudes that is popular among some niche communities on the left isn’t doing any favours at all. Combine that with Republicans or Trump attracting young men as a vote-bank, it’s gonna be extremely bad for the liberals.
The fact is very few young man would want to vote for a party that could be easily portrayed as impotent and defeatist.
737900ER on
For a lot of people I know who live in Blue States in their early-mid 30s with a $150k-$300k HH income they’re facing a huge life choice:
1. Move to a Red State for less expensive housing so we can afford children.
2. Stay in a Blue State and be childless.
737900ER on
> That Democrats might choose to have fewer babies under a Republican president, and perhaps vice versa, may seem intuitive. People take into account a lot of factors when they’re deciding to have kids, including the economy and their readiness to parent. “People are not just looking at the price of eggs,”
memed into existence
LongLastingStick on
We’ve always talked about having 2-3, but with the way things are going it seems risky to go for 3.
jclarks074 on
A large part of this is likely due to birth rates among nonwhite women converging with white women. Since 2000, the white-black gap in TFR has decreased from 0.31 to 0.07, while the white-Hispanic gap has decreased from 0.86 to 0.32.
rphillish on
Lol this is so stupid. Oh Libs need to make their own babies because we all know you can’t influence adults to support your policies and values
Keep up the articles that could’ve been a tweet, Atlantic
Hannig4n on
Not sure I’ve ever heard anyone talk about the “birth rate issue” without coming off as a weirdo
PhinsFan17 on
Always wanted kids. Won’t risk pregnancy in a state with no legal abortion. Thems the breaks.
PersonalDebater on
I see that r/childfree got wind of this article earlier. No opinion on it just lol
One-Peanut-9866 on
I’m actually surprised this is so asymmetric. I was pretty devastated by the election results but I got pregnant (intentionally) like a week after the election. The election did not factor into my decision at all. Like most of my liberal female friends, I put off having kids until I had a good partner, a house, could afford childcare, and was settled in my career. If I delayed further based on the election I’d be losing a huge percentage of my remaining fertile years.
11 Comments
https://archive.is/ZZ5NS
Birth rates on the left fell in the last Trump presidency. That seems likely to happen again.
Donald Trump’s first term saw a great deal of political polarization. Right- and left-leaning Americans disagreed about environmental regulation and immigration. They disagreed about vaccines and reproductive rights. **And they disagreed about whether or not to have children: As Republicans started having more babies under Trump, the birth rate among Democrats fell dramatically**.
A few years ago, Gordon Dahl, an economist at UC San Diego, set out to measure how Trump’s 2016 victory might have affected conception rates in the years following. And he and his colleagues found a clear effect: **Starting after Trump’s election, through the end of 2018, 38,000 fewer babies than would otherwise be expected were conceived in Democratic counties. By contrast, 7,000 more than expected were conceived in Republican counties in that same period**. (The study, published in 2022, was conducted before data on the rest of Trump’s term were available.) *Over the past 3 decades, Republicans have generally given birth to more kids than Democrats* have. But during those **first years of the first Trump administration, the partisan birth gap widened by 17%. “You see a clear and undeniable shift in who’s having babies,” Dahl told** me.
That isn’t to say 38,000 couples took one look at President Trump and decided, Nope, no baby for us! But the correlation that Dahl’s team found was clear and strong. The researchers *also hypothesized that George W. Bush’s win in 2000, another close election, would have had a noticeable effect on fertility* rates. And they found that **after that election, too, the partisan fertility gap widened, although less dramatically** than after the 2016 election.
# According to experts I spoke with, as the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans has grown, so has the influence of politics on fertility. In Trump’s second term, America may be staring down another Democratic baby bust.
Dahl’s paper suggested a novel idea: Perhaps shifts in political power can influence fertility rates as much as, say, the economy does. This one paper only goes so far: Dahl and his co-authors found evidence for a significant shift in birth rates only in elections that a Republican won; for the 2008 election, they found **no evidence that Barack Obama’s victory affected fertility** rates. (They suggest in the paper, though, that the intense economic impact of the Great Recession might have drowned out any partisan effect.) And the study looked only at those 3 elections; little other research has looked so directly at the impact of American presidential elections on partisan birth rates. But *plenty of studies have found that political stability, politcal freedom and political transitions all affect fertility*. To researchers like Dahl, this growing body of work **suggests that the next 4 years might follow similar trends**.
In the U.S., **partisan differences in fertility patterns have existed since the mid-1990s**. Today, in counties that lean Republican, people tend to have bigger families and lower rates of childlessness; in places that skew **Democratic, families tend to be smaller**. And according to an analysis by the Institute for Family Studies, a right-leaning research group, places that tilt more **Republican have become associated with even higher fertility rates over the past 12 years**. “I don’t think there’s any reason to think that’s about to stop,” Lyman Stone, a demographer with the institute, told me.
That Democrats might choose to have fewer babies under a Republican president, and perhaps vice versa, may seem intuitive. People take into account a lot of factors when they’re deciding to have kids, including the economy and their readiness to parent.
# “People are not just looking at the price of eggs,” Sarah Hayford, the director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University, told me.
**They also consider more subjective factors**, such as their own well-being, their feelings about the state of society, and their confidence (or lack thereof) in political leadership. Trump’s supporters may feel more optimistic than ever about the future, but his detractors feel otherwise. After a few short weeks in office, the president has already announced withdrawals from the Paris Agreement on climate change and the World Health Organization, and paused funding for a slew of government services. Those include child-care-assistance programs, although the administration has promised to support policies to encourage family growth. “**If you’re a Democrat** and you really care about child care and family leave and climate change,” Dahl said, you might conclude that “**this is maybe not the right time to bring a kid** into the world.”
Some would-be parents aren’t just worried about the world they might bring a child into they’re worried about themselves, too. In 2016, *Roe v. Wade* still protected Americans’ right to an abortion. Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe, states across the country have enacted abortion bans. In some cases, those bans have meant that pregnant women have had to wait for care, or be airlifted to other states; as a direct result, at least 5 pregnant American women have died. These risks can weigh heavily. After the election, Planned Parenthood locations across the country saw a **surge in appointments for birth control and vasectomies**.
Brittany, a labor-and-delivery nurse in North Carolina, told me that she and her husband had decided to try for one more kid she wanted a girl, after 3 boys, but after Trump was reelected, she changed her mind. (Brittany requested that I not use her last name, in order to protect her medical privacy.) During her first pregnancy, when she nearly lost her uterus to a severe postpartum hemorrhage, doctors stopped the bleeding with the help of a device that can also be used in abortions. *Emergency abortion is legal in North Carolina, but Brittany fears* that could change or that doctors might become more wary about using those same tools to save her reproductive organs or even her life under an administration that has signaled support for anti-abortion groups. Brittany is 37 now, and not optimistic about her chances of getting pregnant in 4 years, when Trump is out of office. Her husband, who voted for Trump, “thinks that I’m kind of blowing things out of proportion when I say we’re definitely not having another baby because of this administration,” she said. For her, though, it seemed like the only rational choice.
If **Democrats’ drops in fertility over the coming years** do again outstrip Republican gains, that trend will worsen a broader issue the U.S. is facing: a countrywide baby bust. The fertility rate has been falling for almost a decade, save for a brief pandemic baby boom. Around the world, falling birth rates have set off anxieties about how societies might handle, for instance, the challenge of **an aging population with few younger people to care for them**. In the U.S., fears about population collapse also have **helped unite conservatives with the techno-libertarians** who have recently flocked to Trump’s inner orbit. Elon **Musk, who has 12 children**, has repeatedly claimed that population collapse is a bigger threat than climate change. At the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., last month, Vice President J. D. Vance told the crowd, “I want more babies in the United States of America.”
**So far, no country** has hit on the magic public policy that will reverse population decline. **Taiwan** introduced more paid family leave, along with cash benefits and tax credits for parents of young kids. **Russia, Italy, and Greece** have all tried paying people to have kids. **Japan** has tried an **everchanging list** of incentives for some **30 years**, among them subsidized child care, shorter work hours, and cash.
#None of it has worked.
Vance favors expanding the child tax credit; the Trump administration has also sent early signals of family-first policies, including a memo instructing the Department of Transportation to preferentially direct grants and services toward communities with high marriage and birth rates.
As Musk and Vance fight against population decline, they could entice enough Americans to have kids that they can counteract a Democratic deficit, or even reverse falling birth rates. But that won’t be easy.
# “There may be a Trump bump in conservative places and a Trump bust in liberal places,” Stone told me. “I would bet on the dip being bigger.”
This is an under-discussed reality that’s going to bite democrats down the line. Honestly, the cultural anti-natalist attitudes that is popular among some niche communities on the left isn’t doing any favours at all. Combine that with Republicans or Trump attracting young men as a vote-bank, it’s gonna be extremely bad for the liberals.
The fact is very few young man would want to vote for a party that could be easily portrayed as impotent and defeatist.
For a lot of people I know who live in Blue States in their early-mid 30s with a $150k-$300k HH income they’re facing a huge life choice:
1. Move to a Red State for less expensive housing so we can afford children.
2. Stay in a Blue State and be childless.
> That Democrats might choose to have fewer babies under a Republican president, and perhaps vice versa, may seem intuitive. People take into account a lot of factors when they’re deciding to have kids, including the economy and their readiness to parent. “People are not just looking at the price of eggs,”
memed into existence
We’ve always talked about having 2-3, but with the way things are going it seems risky to go for 3.
A large part of this is likely due to birth rates among nonwhite women converging with white women. Since 2000, the white-black gap in TFR has decreased from 0.31 to 0.07, while the white-Hispanic gap has decreased from 0.86 to 0.32.
Lol this is so stupid. Oh Libs need to make their own babies because we all know you can’t influence adults to support your policies and values
Keep up the articles that could’ve been a tweet, Atlantic
Not sure I’ve ever heard anyone talk about the “birth rate issue” without coming off as a weirdo
Always wanted kids. Won’t risk pregnancy in a state with no legal abortion. Thems the breaks.
I see that r/childfree got wind of this article earlier. No opinion on it just lol
I’m actually surprised this is so asymmetric. I was pretty devastated by the election results but I got pregnant (intentionally) like a week after the election. The election did not factor into my decision at all. Like most of my liberal female friends, I put off having kids until I had a good partner, a house, could afford childcare, and was settled in my career. If I delayed further based on the election I’d be losing a huge percentage of my remaining fertile years.