The partisan gap between men and women is widest among the youngest
I am a sucker for analyses of politics by age. The reason for this is lengthy but uncomplicated: I have spent a lot of time thinking and talking about generations — I wrote a book on the subject! — and think the intersection of age and politics tells us a great deal about the political moment.
I was therefore eager to dig into new data from Pew Research Center’s National Public Opinion Reference Survey, looking at party identification across a range of demographics. Age, predictably, was one of them.
Perhaps the most interesting finding centered on the gap in partisan identity by age and gender. You can see the raw numbers below. Notice that, in every age group, men are more likely to identify as Republican (and Republican-leaning independents) than as Democrats. In nearly every age group, women are more likely to identify as Democrats (and leaning independents).
Notice, too, that the differences among men by age are smaller than the differences among women. If we look at net identity (below, as the percentage who identify as Republican/leaners minus those who identify as Democrats/leaners), we see that younger women are the most Democratic. Because of that, the partisan gap between men and women is widest among the youngest respondents.
As has been discussed, including by me, this is the terrain after a rightward shift among young men — and young non-White men in particular. You can see how, over the past five years of NPOR data, the biggest drift has happened among the youngest Americans.
The new Pew data also breaks out partisanship by birth decade, so I figured this was a good opportunity to see what the longer term trend had been on that metric. Using the General Social Survey, I created these charts showing the shift in partisan identification (including leaners) over the past 50 years by birth decade. I overlaid the Pew data where available.
A few things stand out, including the much sharper shift among those born in the 1980s in the Pew data. It’s also noticeable how sharply the partisanship of those born in the 1940s to 1960s — boomers, mostly — shifted to the right in the 1980s. On average, those groups shifted more than 20 points to the right between 1980 and 1992. It wasn’t just that they got more Republican as they got older, as the old adage predicts. It was that they all got more Republican in the same time period.
That suggests that the shift was a function of something other than age, like the popularity of Ronald Reagan. It’s probably not fair, though, to attribute the rightward shift among younger Americans in the moment to Donald Trump. Perhaps it is to some degree. But perhaps it is the unpopularity of Joe Biden, or the lingering effects of covid or the collapse of our shared understanding of reality. Time will (presumably) tell.
We should also probably not assume that any positive effects for the GOP from Trump’s presidency might last among younger Americans. YouGov polling indicates that, since he took office in January, his favorability has plunged the most with younger adults.
You can see a shift back to the left among the youngest respondents to the NPOR survey, too — just a little tick back away from GOP.
And that was measured less than six months into Trump’s effort to overhaul the entire country.
Update: One nice thing about publishing my own analyses is that I can add to them if I am so inclined. And, here, I am so inclined! In short, I took the decade/party data from the GSS and also broke it out by gender.
There isn’t enough data from younger Americans yet to read a whole lot into this (since the sample sizes among the youngest respondents is pretty small), but there you go.