Month: August 2023 Page 5 of 6

High school boys are trending conservative

Twelfth-grade boys are nearly twice as likely to identify as conservative versus liberal, according to a respected federal survey of American youth.

In annual surveys over the last three years, roughly one-quarter of high school seniors self-identified as conservative or “very conservative” on the Monitoring the Future survey….

Nowadays, it is girls who are drifting to the left. The share of 12th-grade girls who identified as liberal rose from 19 percent in 2012 to 30 percent in 2022. Only 12 percent of girls identified as conservative in last year’s survey, administered by the University of Michigan.

Young women, too, are trending liberal. Women ages 18 to 29 are more likely to identify as liberal now than at any time in the past two decades, according to Gallup surveys. Young women are almost twice as likely as young men to claim the liberal tag, a widening gender gap in political beliefs.

The political leanings of young men have changed little over the past two decades, according to an analysis by the Survey Center on American Life. Last year, 43 percent of young men identified as moderate, 31 percent as conservative and 24 percent as liberal. Twenty years earlier, the numbers were more or less the same.

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