Breakpoint: Conservatives Must Know What to Conserve

 By John Stonestreet and Shane Morris

When it comes to marriage, the GOP looks bluer than ever.

Recently, in an article for the Institute for Family Studies, Patrick Brown highlighted the notable decline of marriage and married parenthood among Republican voters. The GOP has long enjoyed larger support from married parents. However, in the most recent election, Brown writes,

[T]here was essentially no political advantage in 2024 for Republicans in congressional districts with higher shares of births … 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.

One reason for this shift is the Republican base has shifted from college-educated, upper-and-middle-class voters to more working-class voters without a college degree, a group in which marriage rates have cratered in recent decades. In 1990, over half of working-class American adults were married. By 2017, that number had dropped to 39%, prompting some to declare marriage a “luxury good.” By contrast, Brown estimates that, today, 67% of college graduates in their thirties are married.

Over the same period that working-class Americans grew ambivalent toward marriage, they trended Republican. The Wall Street Journal reported in November that those without a college degree shifted red by eight points in the last election. The result, Brown writes, is “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.”

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