The Savage Republican

I mentioned this theory before, but it came up again. This time in the Wall Street Journal.

"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."

Now of course, the article does not take into account the "rebellion" factor. I know more than a few college Republicans who are Republican partly out of rebellion, just as many of their parents became liberal out of rebellion to their parents. However, are we are seeing with the Junior Logician, politics is partly a learned behavior. The Junior Logician has, on more than one occasion, argued a conservative point of view on a political issue. Heck, he has already stated that he WILL be campaigning for Senator Coleman when he is up for re-election in 2006! However, the liberal indoctrination that he will get in High School and College so who knows what will happen between now and then.

Rebellion factor aside, the fact is that the liberals are just not having kids like the conservatives are. Even if the liberals DID start having 2-4 kids (to catch up with the conservatives) it will take 18 years for those kids to hit the voter rolls. Either way, this will have an effect on future elections.