What the 2024 Election Tells Us to Expect About Who’s Expecting 

The 2024 election is, blessedly, in our rear-view mirror, and the big story is the confirmation of a long-running trend. Specifically, today’s political parties are divided less by race than in previous decades, and the biggest dividing line in American politics is increasingly becoming educational polarization. 

Indeed, one of the biggest predictors of whether a state voted for President-elect Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris is its share of adults with a college degree. The story is fairly straightforward: Democrats have adopted the policies and patois of Americans who spend four years or more on a college campus, while working-class voters have swung to the right. In all but a handful of cases, states with an above-average share of residents with a bachelor’s or more voted blue, those at or below average voted red. 

This educational polarization threatens to scramble the long-term political map in all sorts of different ways. But perhaps one underrated dynamic is that long-running trends in family formation are intersecting with this political polarization in new and unpredictable ways. Compared to just a decade ago, Republicans are drawing from a more working-class base—and those voters have been the hardest hit by the decline in marriage. So, this year’s returns offer a suggestion for how the cultural dynamics that are remaking American politics may alter the relationship between fertility and political behavior as well. 

To start, we can look at marriage and fertility rates and 2024 election results. At the state level, the relationship between a state’s share of adults who are currently married and what share of its vote went for Trump or Harris is surprisingly flat. But that conceals a great deal of heterogeneity within states. 

As IFS researcher Grant Bailey pointed out on X/Twitter, county marriage rates are positively correlated with President-elect Donald Trump’s vote share, especially for couples with relatively high proportions of young adults currently married. This makes sense because younger adults who self-select in to marrying early are more likely to be religious and conservative. 

And in Congressional races, we find the share of adults who are married is strongly correlated with the GOP share of the vote in the 2024 election. This, of course, is partly due to marriage being correlated with other demographic factors. Married voters are much more likely to be older, and older voters are, on average, less likely to have college degrees and more likely to hold conservative economic and social positions, explaining their overall Republican-leaning skew. 

A more salient point for the ongoing discussions around which party is better in tune with the interests and preferences of today’s parents can be found by examining the GOP’s share of the 2024 Congressional vote by the presence of children. Here, we see a fairly modest correlation between parenthood and red-leaning voting patterns. 

Across the U.S., 29.9% of households have at least one child under 18 at home. If we knew nothing about a given Congressional district except that 20% of its households had kids present, we’d predict a GOP candidate would garner about 47.4% of the vote. If the share of households with children in a given district doubled, to 40%, a simple linear trend predicts our hypothetical GOP candidate will see their vote share increase by about 4.8 percentage points, to 52.2%. That’s not nothing, but suggests parenthood, in and of itself, isn’t a fully decisive electoral factor. 

Married parenthood, however, does have a stronger relationship with the GOP vote share. For every increase of 10 percentage points in the share of households in a given Congressional district that are made up of married couples with kids under 18, the GOP vote share increases by 6.4 percentage points. Though aspiring political consultants should note how relatively small a portion of the overall population these households make up. Nationally, just 17.6% of all households are made up of married couples with children under 18 at home; as recently as 2000, that share was 24.3 percent. 

But there is one more wrinkle to address. Marriage rates, particularly among today’s young adults, are becoming increasingly correlated with educational attainment. In my calculations using 2023 American Community Survey data, 67% of 35- to 39-year-olds with a four-year college degree or more were currently married. Among those in that age group without a bachelor’s degree or more, just 47% were married—and the discrepancy is on track to grow. 

In short, college-educated young adults in their prime years of family formation are more likely to be getting married than their working-class peers. Educational polarization means these college-educated voters are swinging left while those without a degree move right. And all the while, rates of single parenthood are slowly ebbing after a decades-long increase. The result: a Republican party that has boosted its appeal in parts of the country where out-of-wedlock births are relatively higher, while losing some of its appeal to college-educated parents.

Put those trends together, and there was essentially no political advantage in 2024 for Republicans in congressional districts with higher shares of births born to married parents. In fact, some of the Congressional districts with the highest share of births within marriage are wealthy Democratic strongholds: New York’s Upper West Side, the Boston suburbs, Northern Virginia, and Silicon Valley. Compare this to 2012, in which Republicans dramatically outperformed Democrats in counties where higher shares of babies were born to married couples. This suggests in years to come—if current trends persist—the GOP advantage with married parents may not be rock-solid. 

The good news for Republicans is that, overall, parents still skew red; perhaps as kids grow up, their parents’ political preferences will change as well (anecdotally, I know more than a handful of parents for whom that has been true.) But this evolving dynamic should encourage conservative policymakers and their staffers to think about who their base is: compared to years previous, it’s less likely to be stably-married new parents in a nice suburban split-level. It’s increasingly likely to be cohabiting parents, or households with less stable parental relationships, reflecting the decline of marriage among America’s working-class communities. 

Tapping into populist sentiments is a powerful way to win elections, but it can’t remain election rhetoric. Authentic, problem-solving conservative populism should seek to address the reality that too many Americans have the sense that their country’s key institutions—not least marriage— are failing them. 

Part of the lesson from the 2024 election should be a conservative coalition that recognizes the electoral power of its working-class base. That should include prioritizing pro-family efforts, from eliminating marriage penalties and expanding the Child Tax Credit to offering a ‘Baby Bonus’ to new parents and more. 

The long-run ramifications of 2024 are very much an open question. But if the “realignment” along educational lines helps Republican members of Congress focus on barriers to family formation for working-class Americans, it could open doors to encourage more couples to establish strong families for the benefit of not just their kids, but each other.

Patrick T. Brown (@PTBwrites) is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he writes the weekly “Family Matters” newsletter.