Stork Politics

Lefties have been fretting for awhile about the birth gap with righties. In conservative Utah, families have been seen traveling around in decommissioned airport shuttles. Some advice for the left from a political scientist: fewer pets, more babies. More insight on this trend, with podcast, from the S.F. Chronicle:

"Take a randomly selected sample of 100 liberal adults and 100 conservative adults. According to an analysis of the 2004 General Social Survey — a bible of data for social scientists — the liberals would have had 147 kids, while the conservatives would have had 208. That's a fertility gap of 41 percent. Even adjusting for other variables like age and income, there is a gap of 19 percent."

And don't think children universally rebel against their parents.

"Political scientists have long found that 4 out of 5 people with a party preference grow up to vote the way their parents voted. In fact, while many people experience a temporary rejection of their parents' politics in very early adulthood, virtually nothing is more predictive of your political ideology than that of your parents — it's more of a determining factor than income, education or any other societal yardstick."