This story was originally published by Trouble in God’s Country
It’s official: The $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill didn’t get a single Republican vote in the U.S. House or Senate. I will leave it to various mystics, shamans, and readers of animal entrails to find any actual logic in the GOP’s lock-step opposition to the bill (which enjoys solid public support, including from a majority of Republican voters), but I do have to wonder if any among their ranks recognize the importance of one component of the bill to their hopes of rebuilding a political majority.
I’m referring, of course, to the $100 billion child-care tax benefit included in the bill. Under this part of the legislation, the federal government will send parents a $300 monthly child care stipend for every child under the age of 6 and $250 for every child between 6 and 17. This is in addition to the $1,400 in direct stimulus payments most Americans will receive under the legislation.
Democrats, of course, see the child care benefit as a means of helping parents get back to work, supporting early childhood development, and lifting millions of American kids out of childhood poverty. Republicans, apparently, see it as yet another step down the slippery slope to godless communism. U.S. Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Marco Rubio (R-Florida) issued a joint statement saying they could support an expanded child care tax credit, but not the advance cash payouts.
“That is not tax relief for working parents,” Lee and Rubio harrumphed. “It is welfare assistance. An essential part of being pro-family is being pro-work. Congress should expand the Child Tax Credit without undercutting the responsibility of parents to work to provide for their families.”
Well, OK. But even if Lee, Rubio, and their GOP colleagues don’t buy into the Democrats’ squishy child- and family-friendly arguments, you’d think they might see the raw political benefit of, basically, being able to use tax dollars to bribe Republicans of child-bearing age to have children.
(This is not a novel concept. European countries confronting their own baby busts have resorted to all manner of financial incentives. Don’t believe it? Google “countries paying people to have babies.” My personal favorite is the “Do it for Denmark” campaign, which features public service advertisements like this one.)
While Democrats will also benefit from this aspect of the Biden plan’s child care allowance, Republicans arguably have more to gain from it. A huge chunk of GOP voters are, after all, old and dying off.
And by “GOP voters,” we mean primarily white voters, a great number of whom reside in rural areas. We have reported for the past couple of years on the increasing number of Georgia counties that now have more deaths than births. The number of counties reporting more deaths than births has increased steadily since the Great Recession. That number peaked in 2018, when 79 of the state’s 159 counties reported more deaths than births; in 2019, 78 counties fell into that category and one had exactly the same number of deaths and births.
As jarring as those numbers may be, they become starker still when you drill down and look only at white births and deaths. In 2019, 103 largely rural Georgia counties buried more white people than were born; 81 of those counties voted (heavily, in most cases) for Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler over Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in the January 5, 2021, runoffs that turned the U.S. Senate blue.
The two maps below may help clarify the challenge facing Republicans. The one on the left shows the state’s political divide as it stood after the January 5th runoffs for the U.S. Senate. Democratic victors Ossoff and Warnock dominated Metro Atlanta, expanded the party’s grip on the black belt that runs from southwest Georgia north and east to Augusta, and won in significant coastal counties (all shown in blue); the Republican incumbents, Perdue and Loeffler, prevailed primarily in small rural counties and some growing exurban counties around and near the Metro Atlanta region (shown in Team GOP red).
The map to the right contrasts counties that had more white deaths than births (those in red) in the five-year period from 2015 through 2019 versus those that had more white births than deaths (blue). The two maps are obviously not a perfect match, but the extent of the overlap ought to give any sentient Republican strategist at least a mild case of insomnia and heartburn.
If the maps fail to trouble GOP war planners, the graph below might — especially over the long term. It spotlights a data point that I really hadn’t been looking for and that surprised me enough that I’ve completely double-checked my work. I went back to the Georgia Department of Public Health’s OASIS website and pulled all the raw data a second time and then rebuilt my spreadsheet from the ground up, and can now report the following: For the past 10 years, blacks in Georgia have been posting more net births (births minus deaths) than whites.
From 1994 (the earliest year for which the Georgia Department of Public Health has data) through 2007, whites maintained an unsurprising and even growing advantage in this category, as this graph shows.
The white surplus of births over deaths peaked in 2006 at 44,768, dropped a little in 2007, and then plunged by nearly 10,000 in 2008. The black surplus of births over deaths also began to shrink around the same time — in 2008 — but not nearly as severely. The net effect was that the black and white lines crossed in 2010 and blacks have been building a growing advantage ever since. In 2019, net white births were just under 11,000 — about one-fourth of the all-time high in 2006; net black births for 2019 fell just short of 22,000, nearly double the number of net white births.
We’ve written before about the demographic, economic, and education-related aftershocks of the Great Recession — patterns and trends that began to take shape in 2008 and ’09 and have continued ever since. Without exception, these trends have taken a harder toll on rural Georgia, and this one — a demographic shift with clear political implications — seems certain to do the same.
This, then, is the demographic and political maelstrom facing Georgia Republicans. Right now the most visible GOP strategy seems to be to pass legislation that would make it harder for Democrats to vote. But at least one Georgia Republican leader has been on the record with a visionary strategy designed to respond directly to the rapidly developing demographic tsunami: Brant Frost. the party’s second vice-chairman, proclaimed in 2019 that the party’s path to continued dominance was to out-breed their Democratic Party adversaries.
“Christian and conservative women have a 35 percent fertility advantage over Democrat women,” Frost told a meeting of Oconee County Republicans in 2019. “And the more conservative a woman is, the more likely she is to be married and have lots of kids – three, four, five, six kids. And the more liberal and leftist a woman is, the less likely she is to even be married and have any children at all …”
It’s unknown just how much traction Frost’s plan has gotten among Republican women, but the Biden child care allowance might well provide just the kind of cash stimulus that would give his plan a real boost.
Either that, or Republicans may want to rethink their opposition to the graveyard vote.
Charles Hayslett is a former journalist and public relations professional whose blog, Trouble in God’s Country, focuses on how politics affects health, education, and economics in rural Georgia.
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