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| The Economist |
«Populations grow and shrink from fertility and migration. At first glance Republicans appear to have the edge on both. We combined birth records with population data by age and sex to estimate fertility rates for more than 3,000 counties. In 2024 the total fertility rate—the number of children a woman would be expected to have over her lifetime—was 1.8 in counties that usually vote for Republicans, compared with just 1.4 in those that vote for Democrats (see chart 1).
The trouble comes later in life. Reliably Republican counties skew older, but they have significantly higher death rates even after adjusting for age. A paper published in 2022 by Haider Warraich, then at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and colleagues found that the adjusted death rate in red counties was 16% higher than in blue ones in 2019. Updating their analysis with data from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, we found that the gap had widened to 18% by 2024, and to 27% among the most reliably Republican and Democratic counties. The result is visible in longevity, too: life expectancy in the most reliably Democratic counties is 80.7 years, versus 77.4 in the most reliably Republican ones.
This means deaths now outnumber births in reliably Republican counties for the first time since at least 1982. Natural population growth in solid-red counties fell to -2.0 per 1,000 people during the pandemic, and is now -0.4; in solid-blue counties it is +2.8 (see chart 2).»