By THE ALASKA STORY
Jan. 30, 2026 – US fertility fell again in 2025, dropping to 1.58 births per woman, with approximately 3.60 million births nationwide. But the decline is not evenly distributed across the country.
The above chart, which overlays 2024 Trump vote share by state with the CDC’s 2025 provisional total fertility rates, highlights a demographic and political divide that is increasingly difficult to ignore.
States with higher levels of support for Donald Trump in the 2024 election consistently show higher fertility rates, while states with lower Trump support cluster at the lowest fertility levels. The correlation coefficient is approximately 0.84, an unusually strong relationship for social data, indicating that the pattern is not random noise but a meaningful structural divide.
Geographically, fertility is holding up most clearly in the rural Midwest and Plains states, with South Dakota remaining near replacement-level fertility. By contrast, coastal and highly urbanized states dominate the bottom of the fertility scale, clustering well below the national average. These regional patterns persist even as the national birth rate continues to decline.
We overlaid Covid vaccine usage on this chart and came up with even more striking results: The greater the consumption of Covid vaccine by the state, the lower the fertility rate:
This divide reflects different life models: Higher-fertility states tend to be characterized by earlier marriage, higher religiosity, lower housing pressure, family-centered cultural norms, and less delayed childbearing. Lower-fertility states tend to show the opposite patterns: high urbanization, high housing and childcare costs, delayed family formation, dependence on dual high-income household models, later marriage, and later first births.
The chart is even more telling when we consider that the fertility rate among American Muslims, which are lumped into blue states at a higher rate, is higher than the US average, with women having an average of approximately 2.4 to 2.5 children. This means non-Muslim liberals are not having children and that the replacement of the population of some blue states is trending Muslim over time.
The highest percentages of Muslims are in states with strong Democratic political, including Illinois (3.7% of the population), New York (3.6%), New Jersey (3.5%), and Maryland (3.1%).
What emerges is a feedback loop: The groups that are having more children are also the groups that will shape future school systems, labor markets, cultural norms, and political coalitions. Over time, this creates a self-reinforcing system in which demographic change and political alignment increasingly track together.
