Bush voters have more children than Gore voters

My previous post doesn't explain the whole story. Bush voters in the 2000 election have somewhat more children than Gore voters. During the 2000 election, poor religious people crossed party lines to vote for Bush because the politics of religion was more important to them than the politics of redistribution of wealth.

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -N of cases		PRES00
		1 GORE	2 BUSH	3 NADER	ROW TOTAL
CHILDS	0: NONE	24.6 369	20.6 372	50.6 43	23.1 783
	1: ONE	15.2 227	15.2 274	11.2 9	15.1 511
	2: TWO	27.8 417	30.5 550	20.8 17	29.1 985
	3: THREE	18.6 278	19.5 352	5.5 5	18.7 635
	4: FOUR	8.3 125	8.5 153	7.2 6	8.4 284
	5: FIVE	2.7 41	3.0 54	1.2 1	2.8 96
	6: SIX	1.6 25	1.2 22	2.4 2	1.4 49
	7: SEVEN	.4 6	.9 16	.0 0	.7 22
	8: EIGHT OR MORE	.7 11	.7 12	1.2 1	.7 24
	COL TOTAL	100.0 1,499	100.0 1,805	100.0 84	100.0 3,388
Means		1.92	2.03	1.28	1.96
Std Devs		1.59	1.56	1.70	1.58
Unweighted N		1,517	1,805	85	3,407

Back in the 1980 election, Carter voters had more children than Reagan voters. Times they are a changing.

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -N of cases		PRES80
		1 CARTER	2 REAGAN	3 ANDERSON	ROW TOTAL
CHILDS	0: NONE	22.7 556	22.0 526	39.2 129	23.4 1,211
	1: ONE	15.6 383	14.1 337	14.3 47	14.8 767
	2: TWO	22.9 562	28.0 671	24.4 80	25.4 1,313
	3: THREE	17.0 418	18.2 436	13.1 43	17.3 897
	4: FOUR	10.4 256	9.1 219	5.3 17	9.5 492
	5: FIVE	4.6 113	4.2 101	3.1 10	4.3 224
	6: SIX	2.5 61	2.0 47	.0 0	2.1 108
	7: SEVEN	1.6 40	1.0 23	.6 2	1.3 65
	8: EIGHT OR MORE	2.7 66	1.4 35	.0 0	1.9 101
	COL TOTAL	100.0 2,455	100.0 2,395	100.0 329	100.0 5,179
Means		2.25	2.12	1.43	2.14
Std Devs		1.94	1.73	1.47	1.83
Unweighted N		2,629	2,209	308	5,146

According to the GSS, Carter should have won the election! In reality, Reagan had a huge popular vote lead over Carter (51% to 41%). The GSS is clearly strongly biased in favor of Carter voters. I think that the GSS is biased in favor of a disproportionate number of lower socio-economic status respondents.

(People familiar with the GSS might conclude that I failed to correct for the "black oversamples", but I did. Without the "black oversample" correction, there would be a huge lead in favor of Carter.)

Comments

[ChrisV82]

Interesting numbers, although I guess nothing surprising. Thanks for the charts.

[rose]

Curious once more. Just whose business is it how many children people have anyhow? And who cares?

And are we now going to have a "suggested" number of children per couple? or worse, have a law like China has about how many children a couple is allowed to have?

As far as I can see it isn't anyone's business how many children a couple has, not the politicians, not the pollsters, and not you or me. It isn't even interesting.

[RobertHume]

Of course it is possible that the respondents claimed to have voted for Carter when, in fact, they had not voted at all or voted for Reagan. I suspect Democrats feel more guilty about not voting than do Republicans.

Of course, if you think respondents are lying, it's hard to trust results in any poll, unfortunately.

[Douglas Knight]

RobertHume,
Normally, everyone claims to have voted for the winner, so this Carter bias is weird. It is also normal (especially pre-election) for polls to go left of reality. I'd never heard the suggestion that it had to do with whether people voted. Why do you believe that theory, rather than that they lie about their ballots?

Exit polls solve the problem of no-shows. I imagine they make people more honest about their ballot, too.

[Steve Sailer]

What are the figures for average children among non-Hispanic white voters for Bush vs. Democrats in 2000 and 2004?

How did Brooks get such a strange result? Did he look at some measure of liberal vs. conservative instead of voting?