By Selwyn Duke

See if you can finish this thought:

If tea drinkers are more likely to vote for a given political party, that party will encourage tea drinking.

If bicycle riders are more likely to vote for a given party, that party will encourage bicycle riding.

If newly naturalized immigrants are more likely to vote for a given party, that party will encourage immigration.

Now, if unmarried people are more likely to vote for a given party, that party will encourage ____________.

Given this, is it worth noting that while traditionally married people tend to vote Republican, the unmarried generally support Democrats?

And can we thus draw conclusions about which party is more likely to support what Pope John Paul II called “the basic cell of society” — the family?

Crystal-clear Data

Writing about this recently, commentator Terence P. Jeffrey points out that some high-profile Democrats have often touted the family. Yet it is in decline — and it’s a decline that certainly benefits Democrats politically. As Jeffrey tells us at Creators,

overall, the traditional family is on the decline in the United States. “(F)ewer than half (47%) of U.S. households in 2025 were married couples — a significant shift from 50 years earlier, when nearly two-thirds (66%) were,” said the Census Bureau.

“The percentage of families with their own children under age 18 in the household declined from 54% in 1975 to 39% in 2025,” it said.

And there is a definite political trend in congressional districts that depends on the type of households they are populated with.

… Democrats had a better chance of representing congressional districts where a small percentage of households were married couple families with children under 18. Republicans, meanwhile, had a better chance of representing districts where a larger percentage of households were married couple families with children under 18.

In 2025, according to the Census Bureau data, Democrats represented 46 of the 50 districts (including the District of Columbia) with the lowest percentages of married couple family households with their own children under 18.

By contrast, Republicans represented 14 of the 20 districts with the highest percentages of married couple family households with their own children under 18.

Not surprisingly, this is apparent in party identification, too. Married men’s Republican/Democrat split is 59 percent/39 percent; married women’s is 50/45, according to 2024 Pew Research Center data. In contrast, the never-married favor the Democrats. Such men break for them 61/37, the women 72/24.

Of course, some will call this correlation, not causation. After all, the kind of people who want to marry and would are more traditional (i.e., conservative) to begin with. They are, therefore, also the kind of people who’d be more likely to vote GOP.

Yet while a factor, first, we know from experience that marrying and having children does, in the aggregate, change people. But then there’s this:

That we’ve bred so many more “non-traditional” people who eschew marriage reflects profound societal change itself.

Anatomy of a Family Annihilation

So what happened? How we reached our current state is a complex question, but The Week provided some insight in 2019. Expounding a bit on liberals’ social-change handiwork, the site wrote that

some of their cultural crusades have destabilized family life. A century ago, divorce and fornication were widely regarded as sinful, and out-of-wedlock births brought shame on young women and their parents. Both husbands and wives had a reasonably clear sense of what they were expected to do within the family. Liberals had reasons (some good, and others less so) for wanting to change these norms. The evidence strongly suggests, though, that the relaxation of traditional mores led to a significant decline in stable marriages and marital births.

This is why conservatives accuse liberals of “destroying the family.” Liberals don’t hate families as such, but they have made a concerted effort to undercut traditional norms that once brought stability to sex, marriage, and family life. Most of the time, this was done with an eye to rectifying injustices (for instance, to battered spouses), enhancing individual freedoms (especially for women), and boosting economic and technological growth. They weren’t trying to create a world in which 40 percent of our children are born out of wedlock. That’s what happened though….

Really, though, this is a quite charitable portrayal. While most liberals “don’t hate families as such,” certain cultural devolutionaries do hate all that is great and good. They despise virtue and have sought to tear down every pillar buttressing Western civilization — including the family.

Yet even insofar as the nobler motivations go, a simple reality is overlooked. That is, “There are no solutions,” wrote Professor Thomas Sowell. “There are only trade-offs.”

You can “enhance” women’s freedom, tear down tradition, and “increase opportunities,” as these changes are euphemistically billed. But trade-offs were always guaranteed. For one thing, young men are now more interested in having children than young women are. (Free sex’s corrupting influence on women factors into this.) This is largely why Western peoples have birthrates below replacement level — and is why they’re disappearing. Does this seem a prudent trade-off?

And the upside? You tell me. Studies have found that women today are not as happy as their grandmothers were at their age. What’s more, while they registered greater happiness than men did in the 1970s, this pattern has now reversed.

Interesting correlation: Whether in the 1970s or today, the sex more enthusiastic about having kids is the happier one. (So is it, “I am woman, hear me roar…right to the Zoloft bottle”?)

Conclusion

In fairness, the blame for family breakdown can’t all be laid at liberals’ feet. Aligning with the reality that conservatives are ever “conserving” yesterday’s liberalism, most conservatives today accept fornication, cohabitation, and all-too-easy divorce. Moreover, amid all the talk about “liberation” and social-change “evolution,” we can fool ourselves and miss a simple truth. The main reason our modern, deviancy-defined-downwards standards are appealing is quite simple: People want to sin. Saying “I’m a social reformer!” however, sounds a tad more noble.

Whatever the case, what can we conclude about our “party of social reform”? Even moderately astute Democratic politicians must surely know that family breakdown increases their power. And does this affect their policymaking? Well, whether they’d rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, you can decide.

This article was originally published at The New American.