Another Big Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives

W hen some Taylor Swift fans listened to the lyrics of her 2025 song “Wi$h Li$t,” in which she sings about yearning to “settle down” with “a couple kids,” they heard a Republican dog whistle.

On social media, they claimed that Swift’s desire for family life was “a conservative agenda on a silver platter.” Swift, an avowed feminist who has endorsed Democratic political candidates, almost certainly did not set out to make “ tradwife propaganda .” But her online critics are getting at something real: Having children—particularly lots of children— has become a bit right-coded, as the kids say.

Americans and Europeans who identify as leftist or liberal tend to have fewer children than those who identify as conservative or right-leaning .

In the United States, differences in desired fertility seem to start at a young age—one 2024 study found that Republican-identifying 12th graders said they want more children than Democrat-identifying 12th graders.

Of course, plenty of liberals have children, and plenty of conservatives have small families or remain childless.

And many Americans identify as neither conservative nor liberal, but rather as something in between.

Still, several academics told me that research conducted in the past few years has shown a fairly strong association between ideology and fertility.

The latest evidence comes from a June report by the Institute for Family Studies, a think tank that promotes marriage and family life, which polled more than 7,000 Americans aged 18 to 54 and found that self-identified conservatives had 1.4 kids , on average, to liberals’ 1.09, a statistically significant difference.

The study also found that liberals were more likely to not have children.

The ideological fertility gap remained even after controlling for other variables that may influence family size, such as religion, race, income, age, marital status, and education. [ Read: A culture war in the bedroom ] Lyman Stone, the head of IFS’s pronatalism initiative and the researcher who ran the poll, told me that when he first saw the results, he thought, Duh .

This trend of greater fertility on the right fits with a pattern that he and other demographers have noticed since the 1990s.

There’s no clear explanation for why, precisely, liberals tend to have fewer children than conservatives do.

Causation and correlation are difficult to untangle here.

Liberals are more likely to pursue higher education and to marry later , both of which can lead to having fewer children, and some research suggests that having children may make a person become more socially conservative.