Young American Women Have Grown More Liberal During Trump Era Compared to Bush, Obama Years, Data Suggest

Young American women have grown more liberal since the start of President Trump’s 2015 campaign than they did during the Bush or Obama eras, new data suggest. According to the latest Gallup poll, the percentage of American women between the ages of 18 and 29 who identified as liberal increased more significantly between 2015 and 2024 than during the transition from the Bush era, when 28 percent of young women identified as liberal, to the Obama era, when 32 percent identified as liberal. The percentage of women who chose to identify as liberal since Trump’s 2015 political campaign has risen by 9 percentage points — up to 41 percent by the first half of 2024, from 32 percent in 2015. In contrast, the data for earlier eras indicates that the political and cultural environment had “little impact” on the political attitudes of young women from 2001 through 2014. While young women over the past two decades have been consistently more likely than men of all ages to identify as liberal, the cohort’s recent shift leftward has been unmatched by other groups and has led the gender gap to widen especially with young men. Young women’s political shift — which Gallup dubs “young women’s leftward expansion” — is not by title only. In addition to becoming increasingly likely to embrace the label of a “liberal,” young women have adopted more liberal positions on specific policy issues.The issues with an “outsized influence on their broader political identity” include the environment, abortion, gun laws, and race relations. These topics, the study notes, can help explain the “surge” in young women’s liberal identity since the Obama era. While the political shift coincides with Trump’s emergence on the political scene, the study notes there are other significant events which may have pushed young American women to take up more liberal views. Such events include the Supreme Court’s legalization of gay marriage in 2015, Senator Clinton’s landmark nomination for president in 2016, the #MeToo movement in 2017, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, among others. “Whether one or more of these events, or numerous others that have taken place since 2015, are responsible for the rise in young women’s liberal identity isn’t evident from the data, but something has clearly prompted a change,” the report notes. Further, Gallup writes that the results place young women as “an important bloc for Kamala Harris to turn out to vote, and therefore, one Donald Trump can’t completely ignore, in their respective attempts to win the presidency in November.” In 2020, 65 percent of female voters younger than 30 voted for President Biden. Young women, however, are not always reliable when it comes to turning out at the polls on election day, historical data suggest. In the same election, Mr. Biden led Trump in securing the vote from females of all ages by a 15-point margin, exit polls show. According to an ABC News/Ipsos poll released last Sunday, among women voters, Vice President Harris is currently leading Trump by a 13-point margin.

Young American Women Have Grown More Liberal During Trump Era Compared to Bush, Obama Years, Data Suggest

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