Redstate

"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill

This news would be more significant for the D's - since if they had a baby boom those little tykes would already be registered to vote in Wisconsin.

"Every time some nitwit college student burns a flag on camera, that's one less idiot who can ever run for public office." - Crank

these analyses are fatally wounded by their lack of attention to another issue: immigration. It's great (and rather predictable) that Conservatives are out-breeding Liberals, but Brooks' speculation that California (!) will become a red state due to this trend is positively comical. Already a state like Colorado, which once looked to be a solid red state, is drifting toward the purple category because of immigration -- it will go the way of California if mass immigration continues.

The Liberals, if they cannot replenish their voters, are quite prepared (with the connivance of the Capitalists) to bring in new ones.

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And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

I agree with that comment. The last word will be the Hispanic factor.....what party do they vote?

Of course, that is still a long time down the road because they have to register or become US citizens....and then they have to vote.

Immigration is the wild card.

Silvio
http://cantotalk.blogspot.com/

...when coupled with the abortion rate among Democrats means that they may be in danger, numbers-wise. As Larry L. Eastland wrote in the American Spectator in June, 2004 (reported here by BPNews):

Democrats are more likely to favor abortion, and their children -– like all children –- are likely to take on the voting habits of their parents. Because Democrats are more likely to abort their children, he posits, they literally are aborting future Democratic voters.

If the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision had never taken place, he asserts, there would have been thousands of additional Democratic voters in Florida to put Gore over the top in that state.

“Do Democrats realize that millions of Missing Voters -- due to the abortion policies they advocate -- gave George W. Bush the margin of victory in 2000?” [Eastland] asks.

Pro-life advocates have long used reasoning similar to Eastland’s -– arguing, for instance, that the person who would have found the cure for cancer may have been aborted in the past three decades. But Eastland takes that argument a different route, arguing that pro-choicers have hurt their own cause by aborting the very voters they crave.

"Missing Voters -- through decisions made in the 1970s and early 1980s, encouraged and emboldened by the feminist movement at the height of its power -- altered the outcome of the U.S. presidency a generation later, in a way proponents of legal abortion could not have imagined,” Eastland asserts.

The loss of voters on both of these fronts makes Paul's point on the importance of the immigration issue that much more prescient:"The Liberals," he says, "if they cannot replenish their voters, are quite prepared...to bring in new ones."

But I'm not sure they're being interpreted very carefully. The first thing I thought upon hearing this was how did they choose the groups for comparison... while they do claim in the article that when all factors are adjusted to be equal, the difference is 19%, the fact that their random selections produced a 41% difference leads me to believe what I initially wondered - is a large part of the different simply due to the fact that younger people tend to vote D while older people tend to vote R? What was the average age of each pool of randomly selected "liberals" and "conservatives" - I speculate that the average age of the liberal pool would probably be noticably lower. Combine this with what I understand to be a known trend toward later childbirth, and the natural shift from D to R that seems to occur with age, and it may do a lot to explain the very large difference between 41% and 19%.

As to the 19% itself, I wonder how that difference correlates to abortion, if at all. In other words, depending on what they measured, a lower number could be the result of a lower conception rate (as caused by, e.g. either greater use of contraception or less sexual activity), or a lower birth rate (caused either by lower conception rates as above or by increased numbers of abortions effectively reducing the number of children).

And how do the numbers correlate to married/unmarried persons with children in each group?

It appears the data are all available online with software to sift and compare different variables. Might make for an interesting evening...

As illustrated by my participation in RS, I've been a conservative for decades. But, of my three children (all voting-age sons), only one is a political conservative.

Since he lives in what we call the "other Washington," perhaps he's close enough to the political sausage factory to be shocked?

I'd need to see more proof of the hypothesis that children of political conservative parent(s) will be disproportionately conservative.

Bellinghamster

While it would be nice to assume that children of conservatives will become conservative, is there anything other than anecdotal evidence to support this assumption? For example, my parents were moderate to liberal democrats, but I would consider myself a moderate to conservative republican.

Politics is not hereditary. The children of those conseravtives will grow up with about the same spread of political orientations as the general population now has (this has always been true in the past), relative to the issues and concerns of their day, about which we can only speculate. If you believe otherwise you will have a hard time explaining any and all political change: why did the Founding Fathers dump Britain whom their parents supported, why did a generation turn against slavery, why did the Baby Boomers turn out to be so different from their parents, etc.

While I think its true that most children will ultimately embrace the values and politics of their family, there are at least two factors the Left has going for it to counter their deficit in birthrates.

(1) Unending Mass Immigration -- I know there are many conservatives/Republicans who actually believe that the GOP can someday break even with immigration, but I think that is mostly a delusional fantasy...and for reasons deeper than that Republicans are just 'mean' to latinos. I think too many conservatives are duped by experts like Micahael Barone, who absurdly assure us that this new wave of immigration is just like the old one from Europe. Of course, to believe this, one must forget that the native birthrate was much, much higher during the last wave, and that the last wave CAME TO AN END, and was then followed by almost 50 yrs of low-moderate immigration (it wasn't undone until the effects of a fraudulent Ted Kennedy bill took force). Both of these factors -- the native birthrate and the cut off of mass immigration -- were crucial in the assimilation process, so the whole 'we've been here before' arguement is bogus. And these are just two of the big differences between now and then, between this America and the one of the early 20th century.

(2) The Left controls powerful opinion-shaping instruments. They control the Entertainment industry, and I doubt that anyone would question the claim that it has had an effect on things like attitudes towards homosexuality. The Left controls most colleges and universities, and while it may not control and dominate public K-12 to the same extent, its still the case that their agenda and views will get much greater play than ours. So while conservatives do and will have more children, it will be a constant battle between the values of the parents versus those the children will constantly be bombarded with at school, and on television, and in movies, and in magazines, and so on and so on.