Back in 2019, a young up-and-comer in the Georgia Republican Party was predicting a bright future for his party on the grounds that God-fearing, conservative, Christian women would happily produce more babies than their godless Democratic counterparts.

“Christian and conservative women have a 35 percent fertility advantage over Democrat women,” Brant Frost V, then the second vice chair of the state GOP, told a meeting of Oconee County Republicans. “And the more conservative a woman is, the more likely she is to be married and have lots of kids – three, four, five, six kids. And the more liberal and leftist a woman is, the less likely she is to even be married and have any children at all …”

I am not making this up. Frost V’s presentation was first reported by retired University of Georgia journalism professor Lee Becker in his excellent Oconee Observations blog and you can still find video of the presentation here. Frost’s remarks start about 45 minutes in.

“They forgot to reproduce,” he said of Democrats. “They forgot to have babies. And we didn’t … In 20 years … [various] institutions are going to have a sharp swing to the right. Nobody’s going to know why. But we know why. We had the kids and they didn’t. The future belongs to us, folks.”

Frost V has, of course, gained more recent notoriety for his family’s business practices. His father, Brant Frost IV, founded First Liberty Building & Loan in Newnan, which the SEC sued in July 2025 for allegedly running a $140 million Ponzi scheme. Frost IV pleaded guilty to felony wire fraud in May and is scheduled to be sentenced later this month. Young Frost V has not escaped unscathed. In February, Georgia’s securities commissioner fined him $500,000, barred him from the securities industry, and referred him to the Coweta County district attorney. No criminal charges have been filed against him.

But it was Frost’s old 2019 comments that bubbled up in the primordial goop that passes for my long-term memory when I was writing a short piece recently on the latest county-level birth and death data for Georgia. I noticed that the overwhelming majority of net births in 2025 – births minus deaths – had taken place in counties that sided with Vice President Kamala Harris, then the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, over Donald J. Trump.

Of the state’s net 27,341 births in 2025, 22,175 — 81.1% — were in the 27 counties that sided with Harris. Only 5,166 net births were recorded in the 132 counties that went for Trump.

Given those numbers, I wondered how young Frost V’s prognostication had fared over time.

Spoiler alert: Not very well.

Based on those 2025 numbers, I decided to take a look back through time. To be clear, I haven’t made cycle-to-cycle adjustments in party alignment; I’ve simply looked at what’s happened since 1994 (the earliest year for which Georgia’s Department of Public Health has data) through 2025 for the 27 counties that sided with Harris in 2024 and the 132 that went for Trump.

For the most part, birth rates — the number of live births per 1,000 women — in the Harris and Trump counties ran in fairly close parallel over that period, as the chart below shows. To give young Frost credit for a bit of prescience, the lines have recently separated in Red Georgia’s favor – but not by anything close to 35 percent. As of 2025, the collective birth rate in the 132 Trump counties was about 10 percent higher than the Harris counties.

But, truth is, that doesn’t help the Trump counties much. One mistake young Frost made is that he neglected to look at the other end of the life cycle: deaths and death rates. Trump Country is way upside down on its burials to baptisms ratio.

In 1994, the death rate in the 132 Trump counties was about 25 percent higher than in the 27 Harris counties — 884.5 deaths per 100,000 residents against 707.9. Three decades later that gap has widened to more than 38 percent: 1,010.8 against 730.9. Blue Georgia’s death rate has barely moved since 1994, up about 3 percent. Red Georgia’s is up more than 14 percent, and it peaked at a genuinely alarming 1,234.7 in 2021.

Put the two rates side by side and you have the whole story in a couple of sentences. Red Georgia’s birth rate advantage is about 10 percent. Its death rate disadvantage flirts with 40 percent.

Now, the birth and death rates are one thing. The raw numbers are considerably more daunting for Trump country.

Split the 31 years into halves. From 1994 through 2009, Georgia added a net 1,087,154 people the old-fashioned way — births minus deaths. The Harris counties accounted for 693,652 of them, or about 64 percent. The Trump counties accounted for 393,502, the other 36 percent.

From 2010 through 2025 — coming out of the Great Recession and continuing through Covid — the state’s total net births fell to 657,261. But the Harris counties’ slice of that pie rose to 76 percent. The Trump counties’ share was down to a 24 percent. In raw terms, Red Georgia lost 237,196 net births between the two eras.

The county-level detail is bleaker still. In 1994, as I’ve reported multiple times, 12 Georgia counties recorded more deaths than births. In 2025, 98 did — and 85 of them were Trump counties. Nearly two-thirds of the counties that voted for Donald Trump last year are now, in the most literal sense available, dying.

You might think, given all this, that Georgia’s Republican leadership would be scrambling to do a couple of things. One would be to help expectant mothers in Red Georgia. The second, to keep the voters it already has alive a little longer.

You would be wrong. Take the five most Republican counties in the state — Banks, Brantley, Echols, Glascock and Pierce. Not one of them has a hospital that delivers babies. Not one appears to have a practicing OB/GYN inside the county line. All five are maternity care deserts, and the situation is getting worse, not better: Wayne Memorial in Jesup closed its labor and delivery unit in February 2025, and St. Mary’s Sacred Heart in Lavonia followed suit later that same year.

There is, of course, an obvious caveat. Being born in a red county doesn’t necessarily make you a Republican any more than being born in a blue county guarantees you’ll grow up to be a Democrat. Political scientists have spent a fair amount of time noodling over this question. Perhaps the most interesting study I found was from Pew, a 2019 report that found concordance a little over 80 percent for Republicans and nearly 90 percent for Democrats — but only among teenagers still living under their parents’ roof. What happens after they left home is less clear.

Or we could just ask Ronald Reagan. His son Ron Jr. is a lifelong atheist who does television ads for the Freedom From Religion Foundation. His daughter Patti Davis spent the 1980s as an anti-nuclear activist. If the Gipper couldn’t keep his own dinner table in line, Brant Frost V and Georgia’s Republicans may have trouble holding their margins in the 132 currently red counties.

Which brings us, finally, to this.

If you were running a political party whose counties were burying people at a rate 38 percent higher than the other side’s — even before you adjust for the fact that red Georgia is older — and whose counties were producing 60 percent fewer net babies than they did a generation ago, you would only have a couple of options. You could try to grow your base. Or you could try to make sure fewer of the other side’s got to vote.

Option No. 1 doesn’t seem to be working out for the Georgia GOP, at least not through procreation and longevity. But study the numbers above and the party’s passion for cutting metro Atlanta’s absentee drop boxes by 75 percent, compressing runoff early voting from three weeks to one, and making it possible to challenge voter registrations by the thousands — all under the guise of “election integrity” — actually makes political sense. Indeed, it starts to look like a sober reading of the actuarial tables.

Frost V told the Oconee County Republicans that “the future belongs to us.” Turns out the future takes attendance.

(C) Copyright Trouble in God’s Country LLC 2026