In recent years, a number of liberal pundits have argued that demographic trends–particularly the increasing number of Hispanics in the electorate–favor Democrats.

Steve Sailer and Joel Kotkin, however, have recently been calling attention to a different demographic trend–one that favors Republicans. Simply put, Red States have a higher fertility rate than Blue States. As a result, the number of electoral votes in Blue States is likely to decline over time, whereas the number of electoral votes in Red States is likely to increase. As Kotkin notes,

[T]he problem for Democrats isn’t that they are losing among families now. The real problem is that the electoral importance of both nuclear families and the communities where they are congregating is only growing. According to Phillip Longman, a demographer at the New America Foundation, Bush states had a 13 percent higher fertility rate than their blue counterparts, whose base, as he puts it, is essentially “non-replicating.”

Over the past 30 years, the bastions of the Democratic Party have been losing people. Some places such as St. Louis, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Detroit have continued to shrink in good times and bad. Since 2000, some of the bright spots among blue cities–such as Minneapolis, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco–have begun once again to lose population.

Republican regions, by contrast, have continued to grow, in large part because they have become more attractive to families. These include places like Douglas County, Colorado, the nation’s fastest growing county, which also has the fourth highest concentration of white children as a percentage of the population of any county in the nation. Located in the Denver suburbs, the county voted two to one for Bush. The same phenomenon can be seen in other fast-growing suburban counties–also mostly white–near Minneapolis (Scott), Dallas (Rockwall, Collin), Washington, D.C. (Loudon), Atlanta (Forsyth), and Columbus, Ohio (Delaware). All have growing populations and all went between 56 and 83 percent for Bush.

What should Democrats do? Kotkin argues persuasively they must become more attentive to the concerns of suburban parents:

Democratic legislators too often seem hostile to suburban concerns, and indifferent to the aspirations of those who would like to buy a home and a small green place to call their own. In Albuquerque, for example, planners working for the local Democratic regime advocated banning backyards, an essential part of the middle-class family lifestyle. One even told a local developer that his having four children made him “immoral.” A small–and probably extreme–example? Undoubtedly. But it speaks to a stereotype that Democrats have been battling for years now: that they disdain suburbia and the families who live there. It is long past time for Democrats to start undoing that perception.

Update: Several readers have pointed me to this Wall Street Journal op-ed piece concerning abortion rates and their relationship to electoral trends. The author, Larry Eastland, concludes:

As liberals and Democrats fervently seek new voters and supporters through events, fund-raisers, direct mail and every other form of communication available, they achieve results minuscule in comparison to the loss of voters they suffer from their own abortion policies. It is a grim irony lost on them, for which they will pay dearly in elections to come.

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