Families and Values →
National Journal’s Jonathan Rauch on divorce rate and average age of first-time moms and finds less divorce and fewer young moms in blue states:
The country’s lowest divorce rate belongs to none other than Massachusetts, the original home of same-sex marriage. Palinites might wish that Massachusetts’s enviable marital stability were an anomaly, but it is not. The pattern is robust. States that voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in both 2004 and 2008 boast lower average rates of divorce and teenage childbirth than do states that voted for the Republican in both elections. (That is using family data for 2006 and 2007, the latest available.) You can do a good job of predicting how a state will vote in national elections by looking at its population’s average age at first marriage and childbirth. Six of the seven states with the lowest divorce rates in 2007, and all seven with the lowest teen birthrates in 2006, voted blue in both elections. Six of the seven states with the highest divorce rates in 2007, and five of the seven with the highest teen birthrates, voted red. It’s as if family strictures undermine family structures.
It’s hard to imagine those correlations aren’t a proxy for income. It’s my understanding that red states tend to be poorer. I don’t know what the rate of divorce is across income levels, but I’m pretty sure teen pregnancy is higher in poorer communities (not to say it doesn’t exist elsewhere as well).
