Donald Trump is set to become president again, amid great hopes from some and great fears from others.
The president of the United States, whoever that may be, is often called the most powerful person in the world, and anyone who is in charge of 5,000 or more nuclear warheads certainly qualifies. However, now is a useful time to remind everyone of certain trends that are reshaping our society where a president’s powers are limited to nonexistent.
Let’s take a look at some of them — and how they relate specifically to Virginia.
1. Will birth rates continue to decline?
Birth rates have been falling around much of the world, a combination of social and economic factors. In the post-war era, the birth rate in the United States topped out at 3.582 children per woman, fell beneath the so-called “replacement rate” of 2.1 in 1973 and has never gotten higher. The birth rate bottomed out at 1.772 in 1978, rose slightly above 2.0 (but not above the replacement rate) for much of the 1990s and early 2000s, but then fell again after the Great Recession of 2008 and never recovered. Last year, it was 1.786, a figure that’s stayed essentially flat through Trump’s first term and Joe Biden’s term.
Focusing on the rate, though, masks the actual number of babies being born. Keep in mind there are multiple trends taking place here — the population is aging (reducing the number of women in their child-bearing years), but immigration is also boosting the population (and immigrants tend to be younger). The result: In 2007, the United States saw a record 4.32 million births. Since then, though, that number has fallen almost every year. In 2020, it hit a low of 3.61 million. In 2023, the U.S. saw 3.6 million babies born; preliminary figures suggest the 2024 figure may be as low as 3.31 million.
The number to pay attention to here is the gap between that 2007 high and all the years that follow. In plain language, 2023 saw 700,000 fewer babies born than 2007; 2024 may have seen 1 million fewer babies born.
This has ramifications we haven’t fully grasped yet. Colleges sure have: This is the so-called “enrollment cliff,” a precipitous drop-off in the number of traditional college-age students, which is why we see Roanoke College adding football and Randolph College adding certain sports. They’re all scrambling to make sure they keep their enrollment numbers up. Beyond that, we’re looking at workforce shortages in the future that will dwarf the ones we have now. These numbers also jeopardize many government programs that depend on younger generations paying for older ones ahead of them — Social Security, for instance.
At some point, the federal government will have to deal with the consequences of these declining birth rates but seems poorly placed to change them.
Some governments around the world have tried various policies to boost the number of births but haven’t had much luck. These are very personal decisions that politicians can’t do much about (although subsidizing more child care would help some). Governments can, though, move these numbers through immigration. That’s what Canada has tried to do with high immigration; it has similar gaps and wants to close them. However, Trump’s goal to deport undocumented immigrants would widen them. Meanwhile, a Congressional Budget Office report this week projected that, due to an aging population and declining birth rates, deaths will outnumber births in 2033 — which means that the United States would lose population for the first time ever. The only way to overcome that is through immigration. A recent study by Old Dominion University found that, without immigration, Virginia would now be losing population. There are legitimate concerns about having too much population growth, but population decline is invariably linked to economic decline. That is definitely not a way to make any country great again.
2. Will we continue to see more migration to rural areas?
The pandemic has triggered an unexpected trend: More people are now moving into rural areas. In Virginia, most rural areas are now seeing more people move in than move out, a reversal of what has been happening.
This hasn’t been enough to cause many of these counties to gain population, yet. With an aging population in many of those places, the moving vans coming in are still outnumbered by hearses going out. Still, this is a welcome trend for those who worried their communities were withering away. One of the drivers behind this migration (although by no means the only one) has been the popularity of remote work. We are now seeing some employers calling workers back into the office; Trump wants the federal government to be one of those. However, the long-term number (outlined above) suggests that if there’s a worker shortage, the power will be with the workers — so don’t look for remote work to go away.
The question is whether the migration we’ve seen so far represents the start of a trend or the entire trend.
3. Will growth in manufacturing continue to be sluggish?
Here’s an area where Trump would like to have influence but history suggests he can’t. One of the biggest changes over the past few decades has been the collapse of manufacturing in many places. We have lots of places across Southwest and Southside that have seen this firsthand. Manufacturing jobs in the U.S. peaked in June 1979 at 19.55 million. They declined through the ’80s and ’90s and were at about 17 million in early 2001. Then came the big collapse — Danville and Martinsville and other places can tell you about how their major employers were virtually wiped out. Or sometimes actually wiped out. The nation’s manufacturing workforce hit bottom in February 2010 at 11.45 million. By the time Trump took office in January 2017 the nation had 12.37 million manufacturing jobs, and just before the pandemic hit the number had edged up to 12.78 million. Under Biden, those numbers have come back and most recently stood at 12.87 million. Both Trump and Biden tried, in their own way, to boost American manufacturing. Trump had a little more success than Biden but, in the context of history, neither president’s policies changed things very much. The free market has its own ideas, and a declining labor pool is likely to force manufacturers to turn more to robotics.
4. How will the nation’s energy mix change?
Both Trump and Biden had clear ideas on what fuels we should be using; neither has really gotten his way because the marketplace has been a stronger force than any presidential policy. Trump came into office declaring he would “bring back King Coal.” He did not. U.S. coal production rose slightly his first year in office, but then declined and, even before the pandemic hit, was lower than when he took office. Coal’s role in domestic energy production also declined during his term, from 29.8% to 23.3% before the pandemic hit (I’m not counting 2020 because that skews things). More coal-fired plants were retired under Trump than under Barack Obama’s second term, according to E&E News. Many coal plants were aging, and utilities had little interest in investing in new ones.
Biden, by contrast, wanted to promote renewables, but while it seems we have a lot more — just look at the solar farms across Southside — the national statistics say otherwise. Renewables do now constitute the second-biggest source of electricity in the country, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but that’s primarily because coal has declined even more. The actual share of electricity production that comes from renewables hasn’t changed that much — from 17.6% in 2019 under Trump to 18.7% under Biden in 2023. The big fuel source under both presidents has been natural gas.
Trump says he wants no more wind energy built, but that seems unlikely to happen, not when the states most dependent on wind are solidly Republican-voting ones. South Dakota now gets 60% of its energy from wind, Iowa 54.7%.
In Virginia, in December, the General Assembly’s research arm, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, released an eye-opening report that projected energy demands in the state could triple by 2040 unless the growth of data centers slows down. Given those demands, market pressure is likely to overwhelm much of whatever any president wants. Presidents look at four-year election cycles; utilities look at 40-year investment cycles.
There are plenty of things Trump can change, if he chooses. He can deport people. He can lay on tariffs that disrupt trade patterns. He could invade Greenland, for that matter. I certainly don’t mean to diminish the magnitude of the choices that Americans were offered in November. However, it’s also wise to remember that many of the forces reshaping our society are impervious to politics.
Are you ready for some football?
In this week’s West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter, I’ll tell you about a bill pending before the General Assembly that would change the football schedule at some of Virginia’s colleges. West of the Capital goes out on Friday afternoons. You can sign up for this or any of our newsletters below: