Picture an old-fashioned, idealized American scene. Young kids walk to and from a redbrick public schoolhouse; almost every kid’s commute is less than 10 minutes. On warm weekend days, the children run lemonade stands, doing brisk business. Their parents host a Christmas-tree-and-baked-goods sale on the school field every December, which draws a boisterous crowd. And about those parents: They’re almost all married. Divorce and single parenthood are rare. The whole tableau is, at first glance, a social conservative’s dream come true.This scene exists in the real world. The neighborhood is my own; the elementary school is my kids’ school. But this is no conservative small town. It’s an urban neighborhood in Washington, D.C., a city where Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump 90 percent to 6 percent in the most recent election. Virtually all of the parents in this neighborhood are highly educated Democrats. Judging from what I see in my community here, these deep-blue Washington families are the kinds of families that so many conservatives value.The strong marriages of elite blue America—families whose lives are, in a way, pretty darn conservative—offer a useful counterpoint to the simplistic culture-war narrative. Elite blue Americans are an attractive boogeyman for pundits on the right, who regularly write articles about how such people are pushing outré sexual and family values. But when you actually look at these people, you see a lot of folks who get married, have kids, stay married, and live lives that almost seem ripped from a Norman Rockwell painting. As the cultural commentator Aaron Renn put it, “If you want to see conservative values in practice, you’ll often find them among people who vote Democrat and align on the cultural left.” Conservatives might benefit from closely observing what’s going on here—liberal Americans achieving what seems to be the conservative goal of stable families.Some social scientists have, in fact, argued that blue values such as egalitarianism and secularism tend to produce stronger marriages than red values such as religiosity and traditional gender roles. A few data points support their thesis. For example, highly educated Americans are trending blue in their politics, and highly educated Americans are also more likely to be married. As couples move up the educational ladder from high-school degree to associate’s degree to bachelor’s degree to master’s degree, the marriage rate keeps climbing.[From the July 2026 issue: How to save marriage]But other data paint a different picture. Liberals and Democrats lag behind conservatives and Republicans in marrying and having children, and the gap is growing. As of 2024, among adults aged 30 to 50, Republicans are 18 points more likely than Democrats to be married, and Republican women aged 25 to 35 are 31 points more likely to be mothers. Although delayed marriage and childbearing by Democrats is part of the story, some of the gap is undoubtedly Democrats opting out of marriage and parenthood altogether. Blue values alone don’t seem to directly produce stable families.I’d offer this hypothesis instead: At least among many highly educated Democrats, stable families display a mixture of blue and red traits. That’s what you see in my neighborhood, as I recently wrote about for the Institute for Family Studies. On the blue, egalitarian side, almost every family has two working parents. Stay-at-home moms are scarce. Educational attainment tends to be pretty equal between spouses. And some of the more symbolic lifestyle markers also trend egalitarian. For example, based on the parent lists for my kids’ classrooms, only nine kids out of 50 (18 percent) have two parents who share a last name.But these families also display some more stereotypically red traits—including income hypergamy, meaning that fathers outearn mothers. In terms of income, there are three main career tiers among these well-educated D.C. parents. At the top of the income scale are the private-sector for-profit workers. In the middle are the government bureaucrats. And at the bottom are the nonprofit NGO workers. Most fathers are in the top or middle tier, while most mothers are in the middle or bottom one. (The small number of families with same-sex parents obviously don’t show this gendered division of income, but they also have two married parents who both work.)[Read: The return of the Democratic manly man]Why do these couples gravitate toward this gendered income division? Every couple is different, but for many families, this arrangement allows women to pursue career goals beyond remuneration. For example, one of my female colleagues (married, two young kids, separate last names) is working her self-described “dream job” prosecuting international money launderers in federal court. Her husband is a law-firm partner who makes most of the family’s income. My own household is similar: My wife has her dream job as an immunologist at the National Institutes of Health. It’s a career path that required several years as a poorly paid postdoc, during which I far outearned her. In Jane Austen novels, financially advantageous marriages helped women secure their social station. But in educated blue America, such marriages help women pursue their career goals—while maintaining a household income that can cover the cost of raising kids. Many of these families also have other traditionalist or red-coded markers. For example, many are surprisingly religious. I’d estimate that almost a third of my kids’ friends go to church on a weekly basis, mostly in mainline Protestant or Catholic denominations. This might not reach the churchgoing levels of devout Bible Belt communities, and the mix of churches is definitely different, with evangelical options notably few. But these elite liberals go to church at a higher rate than Americans as a whole. Elite liberals should be proud of their families—and they should preach what they practice. The conservative family scholar Brad Wilcox wasn’t wrong when he called it “hypocrisy” for liberals to publicly promote freewheeling family diversity even while they themselves follow traditional family patterns. Fortunately, some liberals are starting to speak up for the traditional family values generally out of fashion among liberals. In the past few years, for example, liberal writers such as Nicholas Kristof and center-left scholars such as Melissa Kearney have written about how a stable marriage is the best foundation for raising kids. The preaching, in other words, may be catching up to the practice. Let’s hope more people hear it.