Red states, blue states, and affordable family formation is a commentary on new article by Steve about his Affordable Family Formation theory. I don’t have much to add, except a note on this:
To get back to the main point, Sailer is making a geographic argument, that Democrats do better in coastal states because families are less likely to live in coastal metropolitan areas, because housing there is so expensive, because of the geography: less nearby land for suburbs. This makes a lot of sense, although it doesn’t really explain why the people without kids want to vote for Democrats and people with kids want to vote for Republicans. I can see that more culturally conservative people are voting Republican, and these people are more likely to marry and have kids at younger ages–but in that sense the key driving variable is the conservatism, not the marriage or the kids.
I think that Steve’s response would be that a family and kids tend to make you more inclined toward social conservatism. Specifically, full-throated principled defenses of lifestyle libertarianism are less attractive to people who aren’t going to be indulging in that in any case because of the constraints of family life.
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