(Headline USA) Young women are more liberal than they have been in decades, according to a Gallup analysis of more than 20 years of polling data.
Over the past few years, about 4 in 10 young women between the ages of 18 and 29 have described their political views as liberal, compared with two decades ago when about 3 in 10 identified that way.
For many young women, their liberal identity is not just a new label. The share of young women who hold liberal views on the environment, abortion, race relations and gun laws has also jumped by double digits, Gallup found.
Young women “aren’t just identifying as liberal because they like the term or they’re more comfortable with the term, or someone they respect uses the term,” said Lydia Saad, the director of U.S. social research at Gallup. “They have actually become much more liberal in their actual viewpoints.”
While it is hard to pinpoint what is making young women more liberal, they now are overwhelmingly aligned on many issues, which could make it easier for campaigns to motivate them.
Young women are already a constituency that has leaned Democratic — AP VoteCast data shows that 65% of female voters under 30 voted for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 — but they are sometimes less reliable when it comes to turnout.
Young women began to diverge ideologically from other groups, including men between 18 and 29, women over 30 and men over 30, during Democrat Barack Obama‘s presidency. That trend appears to have accelerated more recently.
The change in young women’s political identification is happening across the board, Gallup found, rather than being propelled by a specific subgroup.
Taylor Swift’s endorsement Tuesday of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, after her debate against Trump, illustrated one of the issues where young women have moved to the left. In Swift’s Instagram announcing the endorsement praised Harris and running mate Tim Walz for championing infanticide.
The Gallup analysis found that since the Obama era, young women have become nearly 20 percentage points more likely to support broad abortion rights. There was a roughly similar increase in the share of young women who said protection of the environment should be prioritized over economic growth and in the share of young women who say gun laws should be stricter.
Now, Saad said, solid majorities of young women hold liberal views on issues such as abortion, the environment, and gun laws.
“You’ve got supermajorities of women holding these views,” she said.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
