Liberals frantic to have the Democratic Party recapture the Congress in November are casting their nets far and wide to haul in a new catch of young voters for future elections. If fertility statistics are considered, that catch has to be a disappointment for liberals because there are fewer and fewer young liberal voters in the electoral sea.
The reason? According to Arthur C. Brooks, writing in Tuesday’s Opinion Journal, it’s the "fertility gap" – the dramatically falling birth rate in this country.
Liberals, he writes, "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.”
Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Public Affairs and the author of the forthcoming book "Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism," cites the 2004 General Social Survey as proof that liberals are vanishing. The survey reveals if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If, on the other hand, you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids - a "fertility gap" of a whopping 41 percent.
"Given that about 80 percent 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,” Brooks writes. "Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20 percent - explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.”
And the news gets worse for the prospects of a lot of new little lefties arriving on the scene: The fertility gap is widening by more than half a percentage point per year.
Here's a peek into the future:
Ohio, a state that was split 50-50 between left and right in 2004, will tilt right by 2012, 54 percent to 46 percent. By 2020, it will be certifiably right wing, 59 percent to 41 percent.
California, currently 55-45 in favor of liberals, will be 54-46 in favor of conservatives by 2020 - and all for no other reason than multiple births from family-friendly conservatives.
Conservative Republican families, a majority of whom are pro-life and religious, tend to have more children, whereas more liberal voters, many of whom are unmarried and who support abortion, tend to have less.
The suicidal impulse behind the liberal failure to reproduce was viewed by a liberal newspaper columnist quoted by Brooks as a symbol of liberal compassion and conscience: "Maybe the scales are tipping to the neoconservative, homogenous right in our culture simply because they tend not to give much of a damn for the ramifications of wanton breeding and environmental destruction and pious sanctimony, whereas those on the left actually seem to give a whit for the health of the planet and the dire effects of overpopulation."
Writes Brooks: "It would appear liberals have been quite successful controlling overpopulation - in the Democratic Party . . .
"All things considered, if the Democrats continue to appeal to liberals and the Republicans to conservatives, getting out the youth vote may be increasingly an exercise in futility for the American left."