American political ideology as a whole has shifted left in recent years, but women are becoming even more liberal, according to Gallup.
The survey data, released Wednesday, shows that while the country remains largely center-right, the percentage of those identifying as or leaning liberal has increased over the past three decades, and is now just 1 percent under it’s all-time high.
Roughly 36 percent of adults identify as conservative, 25 percent as liberal and the rest identify as either moderate or unsure, according to the poll.
When broken down by gender ideology, women in the youngest and oldest age groups said they were more likely to identify as liberal.
Women ages 18-29 were 40 percent more likely to be liberal in 2023, a slight decrease from 41 percent in 2022 and 44 percent in 2020, but still higher than the 30 percent in 2013. Those ages 65 and older were 25 percent more likely to identify as liberal — a slight increase from the 21 percent reported in 2013.
Why people oppose liberals to conservatives? Opposite of conservatives are reformists, not liberals.
Part of it is branding-- in the US the GOP got people to think of them as conserving (ie preserving) something, whereas if people got asked to describe a similar situation they might come up with something like regressive. Liberal generally makes sense linguistically, because it’s the same root as liberate, as in you’re free to do what you want.
So whether it comes from a brand or a misunderstanding it doesn’t really matter because conservative vs liberal is how hundreds of millions of people in the US use and understand the words, and you can’t tell people (especially at that scale) that how they speak is wrong because that’s not how language works.