According to court records, I have two children. Because I’m so gosh-darn manly, both my children are boys. (‘Cause that’s how genetics works.) Therefore, I’ve never had to give my kids “the talk” — but I have plenty of friends and relatives with adolescent girls, so I know how “the talk” goes:
“Honey, sit down. It’s time you learned the truth. You have to be careful out there, because boys your age are only after… one thing. It’s all they care about!”
Yeah: That one thing is raising children.
It’s one of the strangest, most unexpected evolutions in modern politics. Almost no one saw it coming: Gen Z men and Gen Z women have switched traditional gender roles on the importance of children.
The gender gap between men and women has been a durable fact of life in American politics — and nowhere is this gap larger than among the youngest cohort of American adults, Gen Z.
But it’s not just politics driving the divide. The latest NBC News Decision Desk Poll powered by SurveyMonkey shows how the political gender gap persists alongside different social beliefs between young men and women.
[…]
Gen Z men who voted for Trump rate having children as the most important thing in their personal definition of success. Gen Z women who voted for Harris ranked having children as the second-least important thing in their personal definition of success.
The friction between single, childless women and married families is the perfect wedge issue for the GOP to exploit, because it speaks to the aspirational goals of both parties: Republican men define success by being wealthy enough to be a father and support a family.
Yet Democratic women define success by being wealthy enough to no longer need a man or a family.
Those two political visions are incompatible. Candidates who cater to the former risk alienating the latter.
The GOP should force the Dems to split the difference.
If politics is a numbers game, then the numbers favor the GOP: There are roughly 268 million Americans over the age of 15. Just 42.7 million are women who’ve never been married. (Another 14.6 million are divorced women.)
By contrast, there are over 136 million married Americans. Married couples — plus all the Gen Z men who aspire to be married — are BY FAR the more important demographic.
Hellbound and Down 