In the primary election and run-off in Texas for a seat in the U.S. Senate, the top two Republican candidates have six children and two long marriages between them, though one of the marriages failed. In the Democratic Party primary, the single and childless 36-year-old state legislator James Talarico faced the 44-year-old Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who avoids discussing her personal life but doesn’t appear to be married or to have children. Texans could register to vote in the childless party or the parent party.
That divide isn’t inevitable, and a crowd of Democratic gubernatorial candidates in California is made up mostly of parents. Antonio Villaraigosa and Xavier Becerra have seven children between them. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan has two. Eric Swalwell has three, if you can hold your nose and imagine Fang Fang’s boyfriend as a family man. They’re running to replace a politically odious failed governor who has four children.
But Villaraigosa and Becerra, et al, are beginning to look like the last in the line of Clinton-era Democrats, and Talarico is starting to look like the future. In a much-polled phenomenon, our political divide is becoming more clearly a lifestyle product. As a Pew Research Center poll showed two years ago, 59 percent of married men identify as Republicans, a number that falls to 24 percent among women who’ve never been married. My Adlai Stevenson-voting late grandfather with three children, a long marriage, and a blue-collar job is becoming a unicorn. How you live is how you vote. Gay voters, you’ll be shocked to hear, are almost 90 percent Democrats. It’s not a lock, but if you never get married or have children, we probably know which party will speak to your values.
Meanwhile, here’s a headline from last summer: “U.S. birth rate hits all-time low, CDC data shows.” Marriage is also in decline, and the average age of a person getting married for the first time is climbing steadily. See how these two things fit together: Unmarried people are significantly more likely to vote for Democrats, and people are becoming significantly more likely to stay unmarried. A trend in life choices threatens to become a trend in politics.
This is where Talarico becomes especially interesting.
The childless man in his late-30s who has never mentioned going on a date with an identifiable woman is deeply invested in the abstraction of other people’s children, who he thinks he loves. And recent reporting suggests that he has certain deeply adolescent habits: “Faith-forward Texas Senate candidate follows porn actors, escorts on Instagram.”
From the same linked story, here’s how a campaign spokesman responded to questions about that choice: “James has never subscribed to Only Fans or an escort service.”
We’ll see how this apparent division works out over time, but it seems to be developing into an identifiable politics of shallow and transactional relationships. The absence of personal attachments threatens to become an ideology of sociopathy and narcissism, developing policy around the idea of other people as wish-fulfilling objects. We’re splitting into a politics of people who face outward and people who face inward. In California, the state legislator who is likely to replace Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives brags about 12-year-olds having easy access to secret abortions and STD medications in his wonderfully progressive state:
The growing prevalence of politicians who never have children seems to connect pretty easily to the policy position that it’s horrible for parents to intervene in the decisions of their 12-year-olds, who should be able to have lots of consequence-free sex all over town without their family being mean about it. A personal path suggests a political direction.
To put that a little differently, there are a bunch of bigger questions running in the background of our apparent political divide, and this is one of them. We may be developing a politics of adulthood, opposed by a politics of adolescence: grown-ups versus lifestyle DINKs.
In more than one sense, we’ll learn what the future looks like when we find out if Talarico can carry Texas.
