The best indicator of whether a state will swing Red or Blue? The cost of buying a home and raising a family

Steve Sailer reports:

The culture wars between Red and Blue States are driven in large part by these objective differences in how family-friendly they are, financially speaking. For example, according to ACCRA, a nonprofit organization that measures the cost of living so corporations can adjust the salaries of employees they relocate, the liberal San Francisco-Oakland area is twice as expensive as the conservative Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. The BestPlaces.net calculator reports, “To maintain the same standard of living, your salary of $100,000 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, California could decrease to $49,708 in Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas.”

Not surprisingly, the San Francisco area is popular with people who don’t need a big backyard for their kids, such as homosexuals and childless couples, while North Texas attracts families from across America. San Francisco is very Democratic, while the Metroplex is quite Republican.

Why? The simplest explanation is that GOP “family values” resound more in states where people can more afford to have families. In parts of the country where “Families can be easily supported, more Persons marry, and earlier in Life.” And where it is economical to buy a house with a yard in a neighborhood with a decent public school, you will generally find more conservatives. It’s a stereotype that marriage, mortgage, and kids make people more conservative, but, like most stereotypes, it’s reasonably true. You’ll find fewer Republicans in places where family formation is expensive. Where fewer people can form families, Republican candidates making speeches about family values just sound irrelevant or irritating.

The arrow of causality points in both directions. Some family-oriented people move to more affordable states in order to marry and have children, while people uninterested in marriage and children move in the opposite direction to enjoy adult lifestyles. This population swapping just makes the electorate more divided by geography rather than tipping the national balance toward one party.

Still, for the many Americans whose innate inclinations fall somewhere in the middle, the cost of forming a family in their current state affects how likely they are to start down the path toward married-with-children conservatism and therefore, cumulatively, which party will eventually prevail nationally.

Imagine a young couple considering marriage who live in the San Francisco Bay Area. He makes $60,000 and she makes $40,000 annually. If he could find a job that pays $50,000 in northern Texas, where costs are only half as high, she could stay home and raise the children. But if they can’t bear to leave California, with its inspiring scenery and lovely weather, she will have to keep working. And if she has to work, are children really such a good idea? And if they aren’t going to have children, why get married at all? And if they aren’t married, are they going to appreciate the nagging of socially conservative politicians?

Four interlocking reasons explain why the affordability of family formation paints the electoral map red or blue.

First is the Dirt Gap: Republican regions simply have more acres of land per person. Even excluding Alaska, counties that voted for Bush are only one-fourth as densely populated on average as Kerry’s counties. Blue State metropolises, such as Boston, Seattle, and Chicago, are mostly located on oceans or Great Lakes, so their suburban expansion is permanently limited to their landward sides. (That’s why Chicago has a West Side but not an East Side.) In contrast, Red State metropolises (such as Atlanta, Phoenix, and San Antonio) are mostly inland. They tend to be surrounded by dirt, not water, allowing their suburbs to spread out over virtually 360 degrees. The supply of suburban land available for development is larger in Red State cities, so the price is lower.

To demonstrate this, consider the 53 percent of the nation’s population who live in the 50 largest metropolitan areas. Among these folks, 73 percent of the Blue Staters live in metropolises bounded by deep water, compared to only 19 percent of the Red Staters.

The second major factor in the Red-Blue divide is the Mortgage Gap. As the law of supply and demand dictates, the limited availability of suburban dirt in most Blue States means housing generally costs more.

This has a striking political corollary. According to ACCRA, Bush carried the 20 states that have the cheapest housing costs, while Kerry won the nine states that are most expensive. The states with the lowest-cost housing are Mississippi (where Bush won an extraordinary 85 percent of the white vote), Arkansas (home state of Bill Clinton but now solidly Republican) and the GOP’s anchor state of Texas.

In recent years, the most expensive state for housing has been California. Although GOP presidential candidates carried California nine out of ten times from 1952 to 1988, they have not come close in the four elections since.

An article you will not forget.Those places that make having families too expensive will lag in population growth.