American Family Values Increasingly Focus on Finances

Study of Trump and Clinton voters finds the economy spilling more into home life.
When asked to name the biggest challenges faced by American families, adults have become more likely to think of financial issues and less likely to bring up social ones—expanding the traditional notion of “family values” to include factors like stress over work and the state of the economy.
This growing affiliation between family and finances, reported in the 2017 American Family Survey, reflects President Donald Trump’s own messaging around family values, which emphasizes hard work and economic security.
Yet the new research, entitled “Marriage and Family in the Age of Trump,” found that evangelicals and conservatives largely remain concerned about cultural issues like single-parent homes, sexual permissiveness, and declining religious affiliation over economic ones impacting their families.
Over the past two years, the proportion of Americans sharing those cultural concerns has decreased by 17 percentage points, while Americans focusing on economic factors has increased by 11 percentage points.
“More people believe that the most serious problems facing marriages and families are economic, and fewer believe that the challenges are primarily cultural,” according to researchers at The Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University and Deseret News, which fielded the survey.
More than three-quarters of Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton ranked financial concerns among the most important challenges for American families, compared to less than half of Trump voters and just 43 percent of evangelicals. On the other hand, nearly 70 percent of Trump voters and 72 percent of evangelicals cited cultural issues, while less than 40 percent of Clinton voters …Continue reading…