Moynihan's Law of the Canadian Border Reconfirmed for Umpty-umpth Time
06/11/2015
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David Leonhardt writes in the New York Times:

When it comes to family arrangements, the United States has a North-South divide. Children growing up across much of the northern part of the country are much more likely to grow up with two parents than children across the South.

It’s not just a red-blue political divide, either. There is a kind of two-parent arc that starts in the West in Utah, runs up through the Dakotas and Minnesota and then down into New England and New Jersey. It encompasses both the conservative Mountain West and the liberal Northeast.

Single-parent families, by contrast, are most common in a Southern arc beginning in Nevada, and extending through New Mexico, Oklahoma and the Deep South before coming up through Appalachia into West Virginia.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) pointed out in 1993 in his last famous essay, “Defining Deviance Down,” that the distance of a state’s capital from the Canadian border correlates fairly well with a host of measures of well-being.

The data is taken from the new study with the rather different title and focus:

Red State Families: Better Than We Knew

by W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas Zill

When it comes to family, red states have a bad reputation. From the media to the academy, red states have acquired a reputation for talking a conservative game regarding family, but utterly failing to deliver on their old-school aspirations in the real world.

This looks pretty interesting, and I hope to blog more about it. However, let me point out that Wilcox and Zill’s contention that their paper …
… is the first study that we know of to explore the state-level link between geographic trends in partisan voting and family stability for children in the United States (although earlier research has explored the relationship between partisanship and family trends at the county level).
is a tad myopic. I pointed out in VDARE 10.5 years ago tomorrow that “years married” among white women 18-44 correlated at a remarkably high level with the Republican candidate’s share of the vote by state in 2000 and 2004.

And the correlation has remained strong. Here’s my February 2013 graph for 2012:

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