In a world where countries’ birth rates are consistently falling to depths well below the replacement level — and where conservatives are more likely than liberals to have children — the global future may be marked by a trend toward traditional values, according to a political analyst.
Michael Barone wrote in a Feb. 13 op-ed for the North State Journal that though plunging birth rates are a worldwide phenomenon, analyses of U.S. fertility patterns provide an image that can be extrapolated to other countries. The U.S. had a birth rate of approximately 1.79 children per woman in 2025. Over the course of the 2020s, conservatives are estimated to have a birth rate of about 2.4 — above the 2.1 replacement level — while liberals’ rate is about 1.8.
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According to Barone, economically developed countries show similar trends. Fertility rates have fallen sharply across Europe, East Asia, and parts of Latin America, with countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand reporting extremely low birth rates.
“What is behind this worldwide trend? At least one thing is clear about what is happening in America — and how it’s different from previous periods. It’s that childbearing has increasingly become a partisan activity,” Barone wrote.
He noted that while conservatives and liberals currently have dramatically different birth rates, that wasn’t always the case: in 1980, both ideologies had fertility rates of 2.7. Barone also cited a gender gap in the desire for children, pointing to young women’s tendencies to lean left and pursue careers and travel rather than marriage and children. The dating scene has changed, Barone said, since young men are more likely than women to say marriage and family are important to them. On college campuses, women outnumber men, and marriage and premarital sex rates have declined alongside the birth rate.
“Extrapolate those trends outward, and you see something like the picture revealed in the Census Bureau’s recently released 2026 estimates of states’ populations,” Barone wrote. “They showed two-thirds of the national population increase occurring in safe red 2024 states, 21% in the seven seriously contested purple states, and only 11% in the safe blue states.”
Barone cited Wall Street Journal columnist Louise Perry, who wrote in a Jan. 28 article that since children often share their parents’ political opinions, Americans should “expect the partisan fertility gap to usher in a U.S. that is more conservative. ”
Perry added, “In fact, the whole of the developed world is on track to become more conservative.”