Sine late 2004, I’ve been pointing out how the family values party does best in Presidential elections in family values states, which tend to be those with high rates of marriage, likely due to Affordable Family Formation. At the Electoral College levels, these correlations are extraordinarily high for the social sciences.
In 2016, however, the GOP nominated a man who embodies family values less than, say, Mitt Romney.
But if you add Mormon Evan McMullin’s vote to Donald Trump’s, well, the old pattern is still around. Above is a nice graph from Thomas B. Edsall’s May 4, 2017 NYT column “President Trump Is the Enemy of Their Enemies.”
This graph updates to 2016 the analysis in an important new paper by the second discoverers (around 2006) of my big insight:
The “Second Demographic Transition” in the US : Exception or Textbook Example?Dr. Lesthaeghe has graciously conceded my priority on noticing many of these correlations between white marriage/fertility and voting.Ron J. Lesthaeghe and Lisa Neidert
Dept. of Sociology and Population Studies Center University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
