The Slow Suicide (a.k.a. Bushicide) of the GOP

The Slow Suicide (a.k.a. Bushicide) of the GOP: My new VDARE column is up. An excerpt:

In states where young white couples make enough money to buy a house with a yard in a neighborhood with a decent public school, they are more likely to get married and more likely to have more children. And where you find lots of white married couples with lots of children, you'll find lots of Republican voters.

So you might think that the Bush Administration would promote policies making family formation more affordable for its political base. But the latest government data suggest that it is accomplishing the opposite...

Now the National Center for Health Statistics has released its "Preliminary Births for 2004" report. And it's more apparent than ever that the demographic trend is not the GOP's friend.

For example, illegitimate births grew 3.8 percent in just one year to a new record of 1,470,000 in 2004. That's 35.7 percent of all births, up from 34.6 percent in 2003.

Among non-Hispanic whites, the illegitimacy rate rose to 24.5 percent...

The President has repeatedly assured us, "Family values don't stop at the Rio Grande River." Yet the U.S. Hispanic illegitimacy rate rose from 45.0 percent to 46.4 percent.

Sure, Latinos are assimilating—but they are assimilating toward African-American norms. The illegitimacy rate is actually higher for American-born Hispanics than for immigrant Hispanics. (Which doesn't bode well for the future crime rate.)

The GOP won 58 percent of the white vote in 2004. It gets about nine out of every ten of its votes from whites.

So it's not good news for Republicans that the number of babies born to white women dropped by 18,000 last year to 2.303 million, because:

- Having babies (legitimately) encourages whites to vote Republican.

- Judging from past elections, white babies are about twice as likely to grow up to vote Republican as are nonwhite babies.

White women accounted for only 56.0 percent of all births in the U.S. last year, down from 56.7 percent in 2003.

The total fertility rate, or expected lifetime number of babies, among white women in their childbearing years fell from 1.87 to 1.85.

That's about 1/8th below the replacement rate at which a demographic group can maintain a stable size.

In contrast, the number of babies born to Hispanic women grew by 33,000 (or 3.6 percent in one year) to 945,000, or 23.0% of all births. (Latinos make up only about 14 percent of all residents, and 6.0 percent of all voters.)

The Hispanic total fertility rate rose from 2.79 to 2.82.

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My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer