Are young women the voting bloc to watch? Recent polling shows what could be a seismic shift in the electorate — young women are not only identifying as liberal at higher rates, but their policy positions have shifted to the left. This is happening as young men trend more moderate, or even conservative in some cases.
But this shift might not just be about politics.
“This is a much larger cultural gap, an experience gap between young men and young women,” said Daniel Cox, senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute. Young women have a “more abiding suspicion of these institutions” like marriage and religion. And that might be connected to the demographic shift seen in political affiliation and beliefs.
Polling from Gallup shows from 2017 to 2024, an average of 40% of young women have identified themselves as liberal. The same size for that cohort was 5,895 women between the ages of 18 and 29. It is significantly higher than the averages from 2008 to 2016 (32%) and 2001 to 2007 (28%). Young men in the same age group over the same three year-spans have more or less stayed the same with 25% of them saying they are liberal.
As for why this gap is widening, Elaine Kamarck, the founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institute, said “Abortion is probably the biggest answer.”
Putting the data into further context, Gallup researchers said it is not just a shift in self-identification. It is also about policy preferences — “Their particularly strong adoption of more liberal positions on the environment and abortion, and their heightened concern about race and gun policy, could indicate these issues have had an outsized influence on their broader political influence.”
Cox said these views are closely aligned.
“If you are pro-choice and in favor of gun control, those policy views predict support for other things like affirmative action,” said Cox. Because young people are also likely to make decisions about who to date and befriend based on politics, then he said this contributes to their political views developing in clusters.
“From 1999 to 2016, women aged 18 to 29 were most likely to identify as politically moderate, even as the percentage identifying as liberal was gradually rising,” Lydia Saad wrote for Gallup. “Between 2017 and 2019, the groups were represented nearly equally among young women, after which the liberal share became the plurality.”
On the other hand, Saad said, the percentage of young women identifying as conservative has been in decline since 2012 and reached an all-time low of 16% of 2020. Both young women’s shift leftward and the gender gap on politics has come up in other polls as well.
The Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School has polled young men and women on political affiliation for the last years. Even over the last four years, there have been statistically significant shifts — for young men, not so much for young women. Forty-two percent of men said they were Democrat and 20% said they were Republican in 2020. Now in 2024, 32% said they are Democrats and 29% said they are Republican.
Women hardly shifted from 2020 to 2024 in terms of identifying as Democrats: 43% and 44% respectively. Other data, not on identification, but on voting patterns from Pew Research Center and Tufts University also shows a gap between young women and men. Albeit, depending on the exit poll, the gap is less pronounced than general survey data.
Voting in the 2024 election has not happened yet, but there is some data that gets the pulse of young men and young women’s views in this current moment. One poll of registered voters between 18 and 29 in battleground states like Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin found a divergence between men and women in favorability numbers on Vice President Kamala Harris.
Fifty-nine percent of women said they had a favorable view of Harris and only 38% of men said they did.
As for why young men are not moving to the left in the same way young women are, Cox said it is complicated.
Young men have a feeling of displacement as the culture has shifted rapidly, said Cox. “They don’t know what to do, they don’t know how to act and how to be, and maybe even how to advocate for themselves.”
The when
Why this happening is, in some ways, linked to when this has happened.
Young women are more likely to go to college now than young men are, said Cox. They are also more likely to be single than previous generations. These experiences correlate with political views. Then, also, different views on religion and sexuality compared to previous generations also contribute, he said.
“The gender gap opened up in 1980 with Ronald Reagan,” said Kamarck. She said she worked for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale at the time, and think the gap opened up because women are more economically insecure and it made them more sensitive to welfare and health care programs.
The majority of women have supported the Democratic candidate in every U.S. presidential election since 1996, according to a data analysis from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. And since 1980, a greater proportion of women than men supported the Democratic candidate, even if the majority of women did not necessarily vote for the Democrat.
More women supported President Bill Clinton in the 1992 election than President George H.W. Bush, but it was not a majority. In 1984, the Rutgers analysis shows 56% of women supported the Republican candidate President Ronald Reagan — that number was lower in 1980, but at 47% it was still a plurality.
Barbara Burrell marks 1980 as something of a turning point for women’s voting behavior in her book “Women and Politics.” She references an article that year from the National Organization for Women with the headline “Women Vote Differently Than Men: Feminist Bloc Emerges in 1980 Elections.”
But then there was also abortion and the ERA, said Kamarck. The 1970s were a shift for women.
“It was the first time that lots of women were graduating from college and lots of women were going into the workforce,” said Kamarck, adding that young women also were having children at a later age.
Around this time period, between 1976 and 1980, the Republican Party made changes to its platform. The 1976 platform mentions that members of the party have differing views on abortion and says the party favors continuing the conversation on a constitutional amendment to restore protection for the right to life. The 1980 platform affirmed direct support for such an amendment and supported Congress restricting the use of taxpayer dollars for abortion.
In the 1976 platform, it says the Republican Party supports the “swift ratification” of the Equal Rights Amendment, while in the 1980 platform, the platform says the Party supports equal rights. But it no longer explicitly endorsed the ERA.
Taking a look at the 1980 Democratic Party platform, the party expressed support for the ERA and opposed efforts to rescind ratification of the ERA in some states. The platform said the party “supports the 1973 Supreme Court decision on abortion rights as the law of the land and opposes any constitutional amendment to restrict or overturn that decision.”
A 1982 article from The New York Times said “the political habits of women appear to be undergoing deep changes that worry the Republicans and raise the long-range hopes of the Democrats.” The writer Adam Clymer said public experts connected the change to Reagan’s hawkishness, but the article concluded with Clymer pointing toward opinion analysts who say women care more than men about abortion and the ERA.
Of course, Reagan than performed better with women in 1984 than in 1980, but the trend continued to the present day where women still vote consistently Democratic — and among young women, support for abortion has increased.
The ‘70s and ‘80s created “a big sea change” where the repercussions can be seen today, said Kamarck. Women having fewer children and entering the workforce was “the biggest change in human history.”
What about now?
As for the point when young women became more liberal in the last couple decades, experts point to a couple key years: 2016, 2017, 2020 and 2022.
Cox pointed toward the #MeToo movement and the election of former President Donald Trump as important cultural events that can help explain the demographic shift, but he said other demographic shifts that have occurred in the last decade or couple decades are worth noting.
2020 was a high point for young women identifying as liberal in Gallup polling data — 44%. Pew Research Center put out a study of validated voters in the 2020 election that showed Trump’s support among women improved from the 2016 election. But younger voters 18 to 29 showed support for Biden.
But when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that reversed Roe v. Wade, things changed for young women. “In the wake of the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, young women generally believe that their lives are connected to other women in American society, while older women are less inclined to agree,” said a report from the Survey Center on American Life. In 2022, women were also less likely to say men and women are treated equally, compared to 2020.
But also young women emerged as the group with the strongest support for abortion.
“Nearly half (48%) of young women believe abortion should be legal under any circumstance. In contrast, only about one-third of young men (34%) and an identical number of senior women (34%) say abortion should be legal without restrictions,” said the report. Though women’s support for abortion overall has increased in recent years, per Gallup polling data, young women’s support has outpaced older women’s support. Young women were also the group most likely to say abortion was of more critical concern than any other issue.
Dobbs changed voters’ political calculuses, said Kamarck. “The reasons why you might blame a presidential candidate for a good or bad economy are fairly abstract.” But with abortion, she said, it is less abstract.
In the 2022 midterms, Cox said, “we found for young women, there was no issue that was more important to them personally than abortion.” Compared to when millennial women were the same age, he said Gen Z women “were far more liberal” on abortion.
What is most misunderstand, Kamarck said, is the intensity of this issue for young women. “Which means that they will turn out and they will vote.”