"The Fertility Gap Liberal politics will prove fruitless"

[pstokely]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008831

The Fertility Gap
Liberal politics will prove fruitless as long as liberals refuse to multiply.

BY ARTHUR C. BROOKS
Tuesday, August 22, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

The midterm election looms, and once again efforts begin afresh to increase voter participation. It has become standard wisdom in American politics that voter turnout is synonymous with good citizenship, justifying just about any scheme to get people to the polls. Arizona is even considering a voter lottery, in which all voters are automatically registered for a $1 million giveaway. Polling places and liquor stores in Arizona will now have something in common.

On the political left, raising the youth vote is one of the most common goals. This implicitly plays to the tired old axiom that a person under 30 who is not a liberal has no heart (whereas one who is still a liberal after 30 has no head). The trouble is, while most "get out the vote" campaigns targeting young people are proxies for the Democratic Party, these efforts haven't apparently done much to win elections for the Democrats. The explanation we often hear from the left is that the new young Democrats are more than counterbalanced by voters scared up by the Republicans on "cultural issues" like abortion, gun rights and gay marriage.

But the data on young Americans tell a different story. Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That's a "fertility gap" of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%--explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.

[Canuckistanian]

1. Because conservatives only crank out Freeper babies

And there are never political differences in the same family, right?

[sendero]

2. This thread has already been done...

.. but I'll make the same point here as I did there. My parents are "conservatives" and as far as I know still Bush suppporters (I don't talk to them about it any more).

I'm a strong "liberal". A lot of things are genetically influenced but I don't think party affiliation is.

[Deja Q]

4. Exactly. It's based from the ambient environment.

Which is a bit larger than even parental influence.

Especially if the offspring decides what mommy and daddy are saying is not true. For example, parents say "homosexuality is wrong". However, the child, when hitting puberty, figures it out that it is homosexual (and there were no role models whatsoever in the media until the early 1990s, so media cannot be blamed!).

[Deja Q]

3. Yes. And an educated populace is less likely to overly breed

beyond its means.

We know better.




The argument works both ways.

What's that ideology again, "Quantity vs quality"?

:shrug: