Here’s what’s true about Republican and Democratic families in the United States: They aren’t that different.
Republicans and Democrats differ when it comes to how government should support families, but in their day-to-day living, whether parents vote red or blue, it doesn’t seem to affect how much time they spend with their children, whether they eat dinner together as a family, or how they engage in activities together. Most families across the red-blue divide like to spend quality time together.
That’s not to say differences don’t exist. Republicans are more likely to get married and have children, and they’re also more likely to attend church with their families. But once married, the vast majority of Americans participate regularly in relationship-building activities with their spouses and children.
Katie Olson, a Democrat who has run for office twice in Utah and describes herself as “fiscally conservative” and a “data nerd,” said the similarities in how parents raise their children, among the findings of the 10th edition of the American Family Survey, stuck out to her.
“I love this part of the study, that shows that we really are all showing up for our families. I think the more people know that, that can elevate our dialogue. You’re not seeing people as the bad guy, you’re just seeing, ‘I also care about my family. I’m trying to help them,’” she said.
Olson is the mother of three young girls, ages 10, 8 and 3, who she raises with her husband Jacob Olson. She is the associate director of budget and strategy for the City of South Jordan, where she tackles government waste, so she gets to see close-up how government policies affect neighborhoods and families.
Another area of agreement in the survey is the sentiment that “raising children is one of life’s greatest joys,” with 86% of Democrats and 89% of Republicans who have children under 18 years old saying this is true.
Both Olson, and former Republican congressional candidate Kathleen Anderson, who also spoke to the Deseret News about the findings of the survey, found areas where they agreed with their fellow partisans, and areas where they found themselves on the other side of the argument, demonstrating how trying to fit anyone neatly into a category doesn’t work.
Anderson is on her second marriage. She and her husband Rob Anderson have been married for 13 years. Both are divorced, and each had four children during their first marriages. Their eight kids are now between the ages of 22 and 34, and six are married. She also has one grandchild who she babysits a couple of days a week.
Anderson says she “hates” when people say all Republicans feel one way and all Democrats feel another way, because there are always exceptions. And some attitudes about marriage and family are as likely to be generational as they are left-right, she said, as she sees attitudes about marriage and having children changing among the young people she knows.
But in one of the widest cleavages between Republicans and Democrats — their attitudes about the importance of marriage as being foundational for families — Anderson said she agrees with her fellow conservatives: marriage does matter.
“As someone who’s been married and divorced and remarried, I know firsthand how difficult that is on these kids. The harder the divorce, the more problems for the children of the divorce,” she said. Adding, “I absolutely do believe that the best scenario for raising children is in a two-parent intact family, one mother, one father.”
Eight in 10 Republicans said they agree that marriage is needed in order to create strong families, according to the findings of the survey, while only 4 in 10 Democrats said the same.
The 10th edition of the annual American Family Survey, released Thursday in Washington, D.C., at the American Enterprise Institute, is a nationally representative study of attitudes about family life in the U.S. It was conducted Aug. 22-29, 2024, by YouGov for Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute, the university’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy and Deseret News and included more than 3,000 adults. The margin of error is plus or minus 2 percentage points.
Olson also doesn’t always fit neatly into ideas about “red” and “blue” America — she said she’s among the “four” in the 4 in 10 Democrats who think marriage is foundational for a family. In a way that makes sense — the 40% of Democrats who say that are more likely to be religious, which Olson is.
But in that statistic, Olson said she also sees something about how Democrats might approach the world differently.
“As Democrats, we’re sort of less likely to say ‘what’s good for us is good for everybody.’ So I think that’s where you see some of that reluctance to say, ‘Oh yes, have families, get married,’ because we’re a little bit more likely to let people choose. But I also do think that we are very much the party that’s saying, ‘let’s invest in families. Let’s do something about it.’”
BYU professor Jeremy C. Pope, who is co-author of the survey report with professor Christopher F. Karpowitz, said the survey doesn’t necessarily answer the “why” behind the different attitudes toward marriage among Democrats and Republicans, but he made an educated guess.
Across the board, young people seem to have higher expectations on where they should be in life before getting married, in terms of education and financial stability, he said. Beyond that though, Pope said, progressive young people staying single longer is a sociological phenomenon that doesn’t necessarily have a tidy explanation.
He worries about this change in attitude.
“I think somewhat distressingly, at least in my view, there are fewer progressive families forming over time,” Pope said, while pointing out that’s true for Republicans as well.
It isn’t as if Democrats won’t get married, “they do,” he said. But, “they’re putting it off further in their lives. There are more single Democrats than there used to be, and because I’m pro-marriage and think marriage is good, I think that’s not a great thing for marriage as an institution.”
On the other side of the partisan divide, Pope said Republicans are much more reluctant to agree government should give special breaks or provide support to families.
Olson said she lands with her fellow Democrats in her willingness to see government provide financial support to families.
While saying she doesn’t believe in spending “stupid money,” when something shows it has value, like the family, she said it’s worth government support.
“Where better to spend our money? I’m very much a believer that families do strengthen society, and so if we can help push that along, I think that’s always worth looking into,” she said. “It’s part of what brought me into the Democratic Party. You see in the data, that willingness to try things, to experiment and do things to help families.”
She listed child care, child tax credits, access to affordable health care and support for mental health as areas that were particularly important to her family.
“We very much benefited when I was a student, and we had a very young family and very, very, very little money. We were able to get those child tax credits, and that, in the end, was how we were able to buy a home in Utah. Being able to get our family into a stable neighborhood has made a huge difference for us,” Olson said.
Pope sees policies like increasing the child tax credit, and other support for families, as sending a message that marriage and family formation matter. It isn’t that the policies will necessarily dramatically increase the number of marriages or children born, but he thinks it could make a difference culturally.
“Families do a lot of great work in society, and when we have fewer of them being formed, we ought to think about ways to create more of those families,” he said.
Recognizing government is already “overextended” in its spending, he said he was sympathetic to the idea that government can’t provide “incredibly generous benefits to people to get married.”
“But I do think that if government was consistently sending the message that, oh, if you’re married, there will be tax benefits, there will be help for people who are raising the next generation of kids, even if it’s not very much, it would help foster a stronger culture of people wanting to get married,” he said.
For Anderson, it comes back to the question of whether government is able to spend its money wisely in support of families, and whether it’s the best institution to provide that support.
Republicans have seen the government misuse taxpayer dollars, she said, and because of that there’s a lack of trust.
“I think if people really felt that your tax dollars were being used well and not wasted, there would be more support for areas where we need more support, right?”
If you eliminate the waste, she said, she thinks Republicans will be more likely to support a policy like expanding the child tax credit.
She pointed to the need to help children, no matter their family situations. “No child deserves to be left behind because of the choices of their parents,” she said. “And I’ve always felt that way, don’t punish the child, you know, to use a church term, ‘for the sins of the parents.’”
She was surprised to see Republicans were much more likely to say government should provide more support to married parents (57%) than to unmarried parents (33%).
“That makes no sense to me,” she said. “Let’s be honest, who’s more likely to be struggling — the single parent or the married parents? Probably the single parents.”
She added, “People are single parents for a myriad of reasons. Some are widowed. Some have been abandoned. Not everybody’s single by choice, right? So I think that’s unfair to assume that if you’re a single parent, you’ve done something wrong.”
Anderson also believes it’s up to individuals to help those in need in their communities, and not always the government. For years she served on the Parent Teacher Association in Utah, eventually landing in a statewide role. Through that volunteer service, she saw the good individuals could do when they got involved.
“You don’t always have to rely on the government to help. There are other ways that we can help as a community that I think a lot of people would support, if it didn’t mean that they had to be taxed more.”
But in there is a message for conservatives, she said. “If you don’t want the government to do it, then my question to you is, what are you willing to do? And that question applies to all of us. If you don’t want the government to do it, what are you willing to do? Because it needs to be done.”
The report, which consists of various fact sheets, is available online at Deseret.com/Americanfamilysurvey. More survey data will be released in coming weeks.