Donald Trump’s first term saw a great deal of political polarization. Right- and left-leaning Americans disagreed about environmental regulation and immigration. They disagreed about vaccines and reproductive rights. And they disagreed about whether or not to have children: As Republicans started having more babies under Trump, the birth rate among Democrats fell dramatically.
A few years ago, Gordon Dahl, an economist at UC San Diego, set out to measure how Trump’s 2016 victory might have affected conception rates in the years following. And he and his colleagues found a clear effect: Starting after Trump’s election, through the end of 2018, 38,000 fewer babies than would otherwise be expected were conceived in Democratic counties. By contrast, 7,000 more than expected were conceived in Republican counties in that same period. (The study, published in 2022, was conducted before data on the rest of Trump’s term were available.) Over the past three decades, Republicans have generally given birth to more kids than Democrats have. But during those first years of the first Trump administration, the partisan birth gap widened by 17 percent. “You see a clear and undeniable shift in who’s having babies,” Dahl told me.
That isn’t to say 38,000 couples took one look at President Trump and decided, Nope, no baby for us! But the correlation that Dahl’s team found was clear and strong. The researchers also hypothesized that George W. Bush’s win in 2000, another close election, would have had a noticeable effect on fertility rates. And they found that after that election, too, the partisan fertility gap widened, although less dramatically than after the 2016 election. According to experts I spoke with, as the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans has grown, so has the influence of politics on fertility. In Trump’s second term, America may be staring down another Democratic baby bust.
Dahl’s paper suggested a novel idea: Perhaps shifts in political power can influence fertility rates as much as, say, the economy does. This one paper only goes so far: Dahl and his co-authors found evidence for a significant shift in birth rates only in elections that a Republican won; for the 2008 election, they found no evidence that Barack Obama’s victory affected fertility rates. (They suggest in the paper, though, that the intense economic impact of the Great Recession might have drowned out any partisan effect.) And the study looked only at those three elections; little other research has looked so directly at the impact of American presidential elections on partisan birth rates. But plenty of studies have found that political stability, political freedom, and political transitions all affect fertility. To researchers like Dahl, this growing body of work suggests that the next four years might follow similar trends.
In the U.S., partisan differences in fertility patterns have existed since the mid-1990s. Today, in counties that lean Republican, people tend to have bigger families and lower rates of childlessness; in places that skew Democratic, families tend to be smaller. And according to an analysis by the Institute for Family Studies, a right-leaning research group, places that tilt more Republican have become associated with even higher fertility rates over the past 12 years. “I don’t think there’s any reason to think that’s about to stop,” Lyman Stone, a demographer with the institute, told me.
That Democrats might choose to have fewer babies under a Republican president, and perhaps vice versa, may seem intuitive. People take into account a lot of factors when they’re deciding to have kids, including the economy and their readiness to parent. “People are not just looking at the price of eggs,” Sarah Hayford, the director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University, told me. They also consider more subjective factors, such as their own well-being, their feelings about the state of society, and their confidence (or lack thereof) in political leadership. Trump’s supporters may feel more optimistic than ever about the future, but his detractors feel otherwise. After a few short weeks in office, the president has already announced withdrawals from the Paris Agreement on climate change and the World Health Organization, and paused funding for a slew of government services. Those include child-care-assistance programs, although the administration has promised to support policies to encourage family growth. “If you’re a Democrat and you really care about child care and family leave and climate change,” Dahl said, you might conclude that “this is maybe not the right time to bring a kid into the world.”
Some would-be parents aren’t just worried about the world they might bring a child into—they’re worried about themselves, too. In 2016, Roe v. Wade still protected Americans’ right to an abortion. Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe, states across the country have enacted abortion bans. In some cases, those bans have meant that pregnant women have had to wait for care, or be airlifted to other states; as a direct result, at least five pregnant American women have died. These risks can weigh heavily. After the election, Planned Parenthood locations across the country saw a surge in appointments for birth control and vasectomies.
Brittany, a labor-and-delivery nurse in North Carolina, told me that she and her husband had decided to try for one more kid—she wanted a girl, after three boys—but after Trump was reelected, she changed her mind. (Brittany requested that I not use her last name, in order to protect her medical privacy.) During her first pregnancy, when she nearly lost her uterus to a severe postpartum hemorrhage, doctors stopped the bleeding with the help of a device that can also be used in abortions. Emergency abortion is legal in North Carolina, but Brittany fears that could change or that doctors might become more wary about using those same tools to save her reproductive organs—or even her life—under an administration that has signaled support for anti-abortion groups. Brittany is 37 now, and not optimistic about her chances of getting pregnant in four years, when Trump is out of office. Her husband, who voted for Trump, “thinks that I’m kind of blowing things out of proportion when I say we’re definitely not having another baby because of this administration,” she said. For her, though, it seemed like the only rational choice.
If Democrats’ drops in fertility over the coming years do again outstrip Republican gains, that trend will worsen a broader issue the U.S. is facing: a countrywide baby bust. The fertility rate has been falling for almost a decade, save for a brief pandemic baby boom. Around the world, falling birth rates have set off anxieties about how societies might handle, for instance, the challenge of an aging population with few younger people to care for them. In the U.S., fears about population collapse also have helped unite conservatives with the techno-libertarians who have recently flocked to Trump’s inner orbit. Elon Musk, who has 12 children, has repeatedly claimed that population collapse is a bigger threat than climate change. At the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., last month, Vice President J. D. Vance told the crowd, “I want more babies in the United States of America.”
So far, no country has hit on the magic public policy that will reverse population decline. Taiwan introduced more paid family leave, along with cash benefits and tax credits for parents of young kids. Russia, Italy, and Greece have all tried paying people to have kids. Japan has tried an ever-changing list of incentives for some 30 years, among them subsidized child care, shorter work hours, and cash. None of it has worked. Vance favors expanding the child tax credit; the Trump administration has also sent early signals of family-first policies, including a memo instructing the Department of Transportation to preferentially direct grants and services toward communities with high marriage and birth rates.
As Musk and Vance fight against population decline, they could entice enough Americans to have kids that they can counteract a Democratic deficit, or even reverse falling birth rates. But that won’t be easy. “There may be a Trump bump in conservative places and a Trump bust in liberal places,” Stone told me. “I would bet on the dip being bigger.”
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