“Was it not ever thus?” asks Jonah. I doubt it. I doubt, that is, that a state’s white fertility rates correlated as strongly with its Republican percentage of the presidential vote in 1960 as it does now. Nor were inner-ring suburbs as Democratic in 1988 as they are now, or rural areas as Republican as they are now. Sure there are a lot of interrelated factors here, such as religiosity and family size, so it might be hard to say precisely what’s driving the change, but surely there has been some change.