A few years ago I noted that French motility was in freefall, down 30% in 30 years, and it was due in large part to the vast quantities of "organic" pesticides they consumed as the country switched to more organic food. Like Germany discovered about energy, political will can't can't change science, and food manufactured using the organic process takes more land, more energy, more water, and more pesticides.
They're not going to to back to DDT to boost 'real French' births but Americans seem to have found a way to offset declines in births; elect a Republican.
Does a Republican winning the White House make women and men more horny? More optimistic about the economy? Does it make Democrats binge-drink more because they believed in the DNC not holding a primary and not letting their own party choose a candidate and got clobbered?
The great thing about demography and its more auspicious-sounding twin, epidemiology, is that anything can correlate to anything.
Yet with enough data, epidemiology can go from nonsense, like that PFAS in water, BPA in cans, or weedkillers that only work in plants, can harm humans, to real science, like that cigarette smoke will give you cancer.
A new paper says there is now enough data and the effect is real; they even call it a Trump Bump. They show that areas that overwhelmingly voted Democrat in the last election, for example, had only a median total fertility rate of 1.31 over the last while counties that overwhelmingly voted for Trump had a median total fertility rate of 1.84. If the left is counting on immigrants to fund their social services in the future, it has risks, while the right is being less risky by having more babies.
It is a trend, not a blip. As the authors note, "in 2012 just 8% of the variance in fertility between counties was accounted for by vote share, that number has grown to 26% by 2024."
Look, we're not Toxic-Free Future or some other shady outfit funded by trial lawyers to manufacture lawsuit bait, so we can't say anything about being more right-wing is causal, but the left overwhelmingly believes in The Precautionary Principle over actual risk, so Democrats need not go as extreme as changing to Republican in hopes it will make them more fertile, maybe just marry a Republican. It needn't even be a Trump one, it could be more of a John McCain-type Republican. They're pretty agreeable.
