Family: The crucial institution

Married white Christians were the demographic core of the country when National Review was founded, and still are the demographic core of the conservative movement it midwifed. The difference in verb tenses between the two halves of that sentence is a problem for that movement, and points to one for the country.

The last 60 years have witnessed a “great sorting” of parties and voters in the United States, a sorting this magazine has promoted. Partisan divisions have come more closely to coincide with ideological ones. Americans got “a choice, not an echo,” as conservatives promised during one of NR’s early campaigns. As part of this process, married white Christians have grown much more likely to vote Republican. A bit more than 40 percent of them backed Dwight Eisenhower’s party, according to political scientist Alan Abramowitz, while more than 60 percent backed George W. Bush’s. They have also shrunk as a share of the electorate, going roughly from 80 to 40 percent over that period. Among voters under 30, they went from almost 80 to below 20 percent.

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