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Hello and welcome to the 538 Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and it is upsetting that we are starting out another Monday podcast talking about an assassination attempt on former President Trump.
On Sunday, Secret Service agents fired at a man with a scoped AK-style rifle on Trump's Florida golf course. He was aiming it onto the course just ahead of where Trump was playing. It's unclear if the suspect fired any shots. He fled by car and was taken into custody a few hours after the attempt.
Charges are expected in the coming days. And Trump was taken away in an armored vehicle and is, of course, as I'm sure you have heard, safe. But it brings us back to the topic of political violence in America. And so we're going to start today with that. We are also going to talk about last week's debate and whether it had any effect on the race for the White House. A majority of Americans say Vice President Harris won that debate.
Did people change their minds as a result? We're also going to talk about endorsements from Taylor Swift to Dick Cheney. Do they matter? And then lastly, we're going to take a look at a new polling analysis from Gallup that shows a yawning gender gap amongst young people. Young men's political identification has changed very little, if at all, over the past couple decades, while young women are identifying as much more liberal.
Here with me to discuss it all is senior researcher Mary Radcliffe. Welcome to the podcast, Mary. Good morning, Galen. Also here with us is polling editor at The New York Times, Ruth Agelnik. Welcome, Ruth. Good morning. Good to be here.
It can be hard to talk about political violence in the context of survey data. We talked about this just a couple months ago, but for one, we still have limited knowledge about the suspect. And secondly, all it takes is one person to see violence as acceptable to wreak havoc
or cause harm. So whether it's, you know, 15% or 3% or even 1% who see violence as an acceptable form of political behavior, again, all it takes is one person. But that being said, what can we say about both
how Americans view political violence, and because this happened just two months ago, how Americans reacted to it the last time. Mary? I pulled up some data on how Americans reacted to the first assassination attempt against Donald Trump. Just to get a sense of how voters were processing this, what factors people were looking at as contributing to the desire for someone to see
violence. And by and large, the biggest factor people look at is just political division writ large. It's not partisan. They were offered the option in this poll from APNORC in July. They were offered the option to say that it's the way Republicans talk. It's the way Democrats talk.
But by and large, people thought it was just the general divisions we face in our country. And I think that's probably still going to be the case with this latest episode. I'm very thankful that it appears nobody was injured in this episode, as far as I can see from the reporting. But generally, I think voters would like to turn down the temperature on some of the rhetoric that we see just in the political sphere, generally speaking, not from one side or the other.
And Ruth, we see pretty big ranges when you look at the polling on what Americans view as acceptable political behavior. The polling oftentimes will ask about things ranging from violence to protesting to whatnot.
What can we say about where the public stands? Yeah, so this is such a difficult thing to ask about, right? Because what happens is if you ask the direct question, it actually overstates people's openness, which can be kind of a confusing thing to process because if somebody says they're open to it, aren't they open to it? But in fact...
The way these questions get asked, they often do overstate the openness. So there are some researchers out of Stanford and Duke that have created this American Political Pulse survey that does a good job of sort of walking people through different types of protest all the way up through violence. And by walking them through one by one, it sort of segments their actual openness. So when they ask about something like protesting without a permit that is technically not allowed but is very much on the side of, like, generally okay, then you get...
a third of people who are open to that. But as you march through things like vandalism, assault, arson, assault with a deadly weapon, they actually go all the way up through murder. It drops off a cliff pretty quickly, and you end up with about 2% of people that are open to these more serious forms of violence. And as you said at the top, 2% of people who are open to murder is...
really scary. It's a lot of people and it only takes one person to do these kind of things. But it gives another side to a lot of these surveys that might show some more openness than we expect, that these researchers did a really nice job of sort of marching people up through the options. And when you get to some of these more serious options, it really drops off a cliff in that you only have about 2% of Americans that are really open to this.
Right. And that's in contrast to some surveys that have shown shocking results along the lines of 15 to 20 percent of Americans are open to political violence. I'm sure we will continue tracking what happens next in terms of both how voters are reacting to this latest attempt and also if we learn any more details about the suspect. Again, really upsetting that we're doing this again on another Monday morning just before
Two months after the last time, and very happy that everyone is okay. But let's move on and talk about the debate. But first, a break. Today's podcast is brought to you by GiveWell. You're a details person. You want to understand how things really work. So when you're giving to charity, you should look at GiveWell, an independent resource for rigorous, transparent research about great giving opportunities whose website will leave even the most detail-oriented reader stunned.
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As I mentioned at the top, Americans pretty clearly said that Harris won the debate last Tuesday. About three in five Americans, in fact. And on top of that, more Americans, according to an ABC News Ipsos poll, said that Harris's performance improved their views of her compared with Trump. But, of course, they don't just do this for fun. They are trying to win an election. So...
Mary, did this change anything in terms of Americans' preference between Trump and Harris?
So far, no. Although, you know, Galen, I always say after any event, if you want to really see how the polls move, I always say two weeks. We're at six days. So be careful with these numbers. But no, the polling average, 538's polling average was at around 2.6 before the debate. It is at around 2.6 now nationally. I don't think we've seen significant changes really in any of the swing states. So
as of right now, it looks like things are pretty much where they were. Yeah, what I've been using as some sort of metric, because I know we get into trouble if we keep citing national polls, given that this is not going to be decided by the national popular vote, is, Mary, I keep looking at your state, Pennsylvania, perhaps the likeliest tipping point state.
I think Harris had a 0.6 percentage point lead, if you want to call it that, in Pennsylvania the day of the debate. It is now 0.5 percentage point lead almost a week after. So there you have it when it comes to the likeliest tipping point state. Well, we're getting some new Pennsylvania data soon, so we'll keep an eye on it. All right. Yes, we will. We will keep a very close eye on it. Really excited. I mean, this is truly what excites us in the 538 offices.
We have whole Slack channels devoted to this. Whole Slack channels. Ruth, speaking of polling that's coming out, I won't, I'm not going to, I'm not going to try to, you know, force your hand here and tell us when the latest New York Times polling is coming out. We are waiting excitedly. But have you seen anything different in the data than what Mary and I have discussed? No.
No, I haven't seen anything different. And, you know, keep your eyes open. Keep waiting. Maybe something will float down from the New York Times polling fairies. But yeah, I mean, I think Mary makes an excellent point that I think we've all made here on this podcast before. And that is that it takes time, both time for sort of opinions to settle on this.
and time for high-quality polls to be conducted. And especially in the swing states, that's going to take a little bit of extra time. I also think there's kind of a complication because often these sort of post-debate impacts can be fleeting. They're bumps, but they're not often lasting. So I'll be paying attention to, one, over the next week if we do see some of that impact sort of coming out. And then, two, if there is an impact, how long that lasts or if it kind of burns hot and fast or...
or if it stays an either candidate who benefits, which you might assume that Harris would benefit given that most of the post-debate polling showed people saying that she won the debate, if that is a lasting impact.
So there's a common debate over whether debates matter. And I think our position has been that they do. Obviously, the June debate mattered a whole lot. It resulted in the end of Joe Biden's political career. And on average, we see that first debates result in two and a half percentage point movement historically. But also historically, the first debate is when about when everyone starts tuning in and
and paying attention. This cycle has been slightly different because so much political news happened in August that perhaps folks started tuning in then and whatever change could have been affected by a first debate had already happened. That's a somewhat coherent narrative to tell. Is that your understanding of how views have evolved or sort of stuck in the race so far?
Yeah, I mean, July and August were just like political earthquakes. We've never we've never seen anything like them before. And I hope we never do. There's a lot. But I think that that sort of sped up the timeline for voters to start putting their eyeballs on the candidates and start thinking about the presidential election, especially because of the change at the top of the ticket. I think people were tuning in a little sooner. The
The number of people who watched this debate was astronomical compared to previous cycles. So I think people already are thinking about the election.
I mean, it was really remarkable in ABC's polling that came out. It showed a better picture for Harris nationally than the average shows. So ABC News' poll with Ipsos showed a six-point lead for Harris after also showing that overwhelmingly Americans thought that she won. But that six-point lead for Harris was the exact same lead amongst likely voters that ABC had shown before the debate happened. So people think that Harris won. 90 million people or something in that range tuned in.
The top line number changed literally not at all.
Yeah, I think we focus a lot on quantitative data, obviously, because that's our focus. We care about polling. But there was some good qualitative data from The Washington Post during this last debate. They looked at some undecided voters and sort of did a little focus group with them during the debate. And one thing that I thought was really interesting is there was a shift in who they thought won the debate, but it didn't really change the overall sort of top line level of support.
And that was really interesting to me. It's a very obviously a small and, you know, particularly idiosyncratic group. But it made me wonder, I mean, you're sort of not seeing this pre post change. I think other people are also not seeing a big pre post change. Will this debate change minds or will people just feel like Harris won and then move on from that? That's what I'm interested to see.
If you look at the polling, we talked about the New York Times Sienna poll, the most recent national poll in a previous podcast about what voters said they wanted to hear from the two candidates.
in terms of policy and character and presentation, all that stuff. I don't really think either candidate did a stellar job of addressing voters' concerns, what they wanted to hear from Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. You know, people said they wanted to hear more about Kamala Harris's policy, and I'm not sure she did a stellar job of addressing that. And likewise for Trump. So I think if you're an undecided voter, while you may have gotten some impression about Trump,
the personalities of these people and the way they carry themselves. I don't know if you necessarily had those key concerns addressed by the debate last week, which may lead undecided voters to just remain undecided. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Of course, the debate was not the only news last Tuesday. We also mentioned when we recorded our late night podcast that Taylor Swift decided to endorse Kamala Harris at the conclusion of the debate. And also,
During the debate, Harris noted that she had received endorsements from more than 200 Republicans, including those who worked for George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain. She also referenced her endorsements from former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Representative Liz Cheney. So...
I think in the moment, maybe we were a little skeptical of what kind of effect Taylor Swift would have on the race and maybe some of these other endorsements as well. But we have some time. And so people have had time to either visit her Instagram posts and click on the link. I think, according to New York Times reporting, over 400,000 visits to vote.gov were the result of the link in Taylor Swift's Instagram post.
Do we expect this endorsement or has this endorsement had any impact on the race whatsoever? You know, I mean, it's really tough to tease out. And the public opinion researcher, the real research part of me is frustrated that this came after the debate because it's really challenging to tease out the debate effect, the Taylor Swift effect, the Republicans endorsing effect.
And there was a question, I believe you guys asked, maybe it was someone else, about whether or not this impacted your decision. And I don't love those questions because I think people are really difficult at judging for themselves whether something actually impacted their decision. But most people said it did not. But much like things we were talking about earlier, it only takes a small amount of people to do something to have a real impact. And so I know...
Some Democratic folks have been looking at voter registrations and have seen voter registration spikes after that link was posted. So I think people are seeing a real measured impact on voter registration. Whether that impacts the race feels harder for me to tell.
This all reminded me a lot of the 2018 Senate race in Tennessee. In 2018, Taylor Swift endorsed Phil Bredesen, the Democrat, for Senate in Tennessee, her home state. Being who I am, I went and pulled some data. Love it. It just so happens that the week before that, we had three polls of that race. And the week after Swift's endorsement, we had three polls of that race.
So you look at the average before the Taylor Swift endorsement, it showed the Republican Marsha Blackburn ahead by 5.3 percentage points. In the week after the Swift endorsement,
Republican Marsha Blackburn was ahead by 5.6 percentage points, a 0.3 percentage point difference in the wrong direction. We had this conversation in 2018. Taylor Swift said, hey, go register to vote. And people, it's really easy to click on a link and register to vote because someone put it up on Instagram. That's a really easy action to take. It is a very far cry from that to doing all the steps you need to do to actually vote. And
Senator Marsha Blackburn ultimately won that race by 11 points. This is pretty thin margin in a state like Tennessee. I would not necessarily chalk that up to Taylor Swift. It's I would chalk that up to Phil Bredesen being a former governor of the state of Tennessee and quite popular.
I don't think it makes any difference. It might spike registration. Whether that changes voting behavior, I think that the evidence is not there. Yeah, and I think it's important to remember that the groups that might be mobilized to register to vote because Taylor Swift posted are the same types of people who vote at relatively lower rates relative to the population at all, particularly young voters. And that's something that predates this. Young voters have always voted at a lower rate.
than older voters. So again, what you said is exactly correct, right? This motivates people to register, whether it motivates them to take a lot of the extra steps that are needed to vote feels more complicated and unlikely. And if someone is registering now, what you're looking at is a voter who in September of an election year is not already registered to vote, right? This is not a like a high turnout voter.
Yeah, I mean, one of the arguments I think folks are making who want to say that Taylor Swift could have an impact on this race, and I'm not saying that I'm convinced here, but is that youth turnout is so low. So, you know, in 2020, about 50 percent of eligible 18 to 29 year olds voted. Only half of eligible young voters voted. And that was a historic turnout.
turnout. That was the highest level since the age was lowered to 18 for voting. By comparison, in 2016, it was around 40% of eligible young voters turned out. So folks will make the argument that, hey, I mean, if somebody as influential as Taylor Swift is going to be encouraging young people to vote, maybe amongst this population that doesn't show up at super high rates will be motivated because there's clearly a lot of growth that you could make there amongst
young voters because a lot of eligible people are not voting. Convinced by this at all? Not especially. I'm getting a lot of nodding heads. Nope, nope, nope.
Listen, I mean, obviously, like this is something that happens every couple of years, right? There's this sense that like young people, this is going to be the year. And there's not a lot of reason to believe in the data that this is necessarily going to be the year. What about the 200 Republicans, including the Cheneys? Do their endorsements change anything in this race?
Again, it feels hard to isolate given the timing. You know, we can't really see impact. If I had it my way, all of these things would happen as separate natural experiments where we can look at them before or after on pulling. But, you know, nobody asked me. It feels fairly unlikely.
partially because the types of people they're hoping to persuade are not necessarily high information voters, right? Like the sort of persuadable voters that we've narrowed down to this small group in the middle of undecided and persuadable voters. They're fairly low information voters. They might be people who voted for Republicans in the past, so that's an argument that it could make a difference. But they also might be people who this information doesn't filter down to, and they don't actually learn that this endorsement happened.
Yeah, I mean, I think the goal of these endorsements is to provide a permission structure for generally Republican-leading voters who have perhaps qualms with Trump, not on a policy level, but on a personal level or character level, to give them a permission structure to put those issues ahead of their policy preferences. But as Ruth said, I mean, I don't know that there's a significant population of, like, Nikki Haley voters who are just sitting at home, unsure of what they're going to do. I think people have chosen a camp.
There's relatively few persuadables in that target audience.
Yeah, my sense of the other goal of these endorsements is not that people are going to say, oh, Dick Cheney is voting for Kamala Harris. Well, then I'm going to vote for Kamala Harris, too, because Dick Cheney has a lot of influence on me and my life and my perception of the world. It's more that Harris, one of her problems in this race is that she's viewed as too liberal by too many Americans. Trump is viewed as too conservative by fewer Americans by comparison.
And so getting these Republican endorsements will say, hey, I can't be all that. Well, I can't be, you know, an extreme candidate from the Bay Area who is, you know, a communist or whatever, if all of these Republicans are endorsing me. And I think that's part of the reason she brings it up during the debate is to say, hey, I'm a mainstream candidate that Republicans can get behind as well.
However, if you look at the data before and after the debate, which also included the period during which these endorsements happened, particularly Dick Cheney, we don't see a lot of movement there. We don't have the New York Times polling yet. Ruth, we're waiting with bated breath. But...
If you look before the Times polling suggests more Americans view Harris as too liberal, if you look at the ABC News Ipsos polling that came out after the debate, it is still the case that more Americans view Harris as too liberal than view Trump as too conservative. So I don't know that this is having the desired effect, but I think that is the desired effect.
Yeah, I think that's right. One kind of interesting anecdote about that too liberal, too conservative question that's really a challenge about Trump, and there are so many polling challenges about Trump. Harris is viewed as too liberal by a lot of Americans. Trump doesn't necessarily exist on a sort of liberal conservative spectrum. We asked that question, as you mentioned, before the debate, and we've asked it a couple times in the past. And we've been getting feedback from our callers, the people who are making the calls, that it's
Some people are really struggling with how to define Trump. They don't know if he's too liberal or too conservative or not conservative enough just because he doesn't really exist on that spectrum. So one thing I struggle with is I think there's sort of a clear understanding of what that question means for Harris. It's a hard comparison because there's not a clear understanding of what that question necessarily means for Trump. I think your analysis still stands, but it's just it's complicated. Well, maybe the question is, then, do you view this candidate as too...
too extreme or mainstream. Yeah. And I think that's where we've moved is to this question of extreme versus mainstream. And that kind of captures a little more of Trump, maybe a little less of Harris. It's complicated because they don't necessarily exist on the same spectrum.
I think one of the challenges with grading the two candidates on the left-right spectrum alone is that, for example, voters may see Trump as more extreme based on, for example, activities surrounding January 6th, which...
would you rate January 6th as liberal or conservative? I mean, I think there are plenty of very conservative Americans who see challenging the foundations of constitutional Republican government as not conservative at all, but voters may still be concerned with that behavior. And so asking something along the lines of, do you see these candidates as more mainstream or extreme? And in fact, we do have some polling on that. So CBS poll
Pennsylvania earlier this month and asked, do you see Harris as mainstream or extreme? Do you see Trump as mainstream or extreme? And on that question in Pennsylvania, the likeliest tipping point state, a majority of respondents said they saw Harris as mainstream. So 54% to 46%, while a majority of respondents said they saw Donald Trump as extreme 56% compared with 44%. So I think we're
We are making we are arriving at an important distinction here, which is the two liberal to conservative thing is one axis, an axis that may still be important to voters on questions of, say, immigration or abortion or whatever, where people do care about the policy outcomes. But there's another measure here that could be important as well.
All right. Speaking of one young woman's high profile endorsement, we're going to talk about a broader trend amongst young women and moving to the left. But first, a break.
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Even before Harris received that endorsement from Taylor Swift, she already had a clear lead amongst women, about nine or 10 points on average. Meanwhile, Donald Trump leads amongst men by roughly seven points on average. Those are rough averages of crosstabs from the past month, but nonetheless, they suggest another election with a significant gender gap.
But that gap might be particularly large amongst young voters. A big multi-year analysis from Gallup released last week found that younger women have become much more liberal in recent years, while young men have remained generally moderate.
For example, during the Bush administration, amongst Americans 18 to 29, 28% of young women said they identified as liberal compared to 25% of young men. That's just a three percentage point gap. Today, it's still 25% of young men who identify as liberal, but 40% of young women who identify that.
that way. Now a 15 percentage point gap. So what does this mean for the election and American politics more broadly? So I've given some detail to the state of the gender gap, but I know that there's a lot more to say here. So Ruth, from the polling that you're looking at, how would you characterize the state of the gender gap overall and amongst young people in particular?
Yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of sort of speculation on this for a while. And a lot of the speculation has focused on sort of the gap growing on both ends, young men becoming more conservative, young women becoming more liberal. I've been a little bit skeptical of that first piece. Yes, young men are becoming a little bit more conservative. But what this Gallup analysis, really robust, rigorous Gallup analysis tells us is that most of this growing gap is coming from
women becoming more liberal. And that makes a lot of sense to me. We've seen a lot of evidence of this over the last few years that's kind of all adding up to what we are ultimately seeing here. You know, a lot of things have happened in the last few years that have really mobilized women. If you look back to 2016 and 2018, the women's marches in 2021,
when the Dobbs decision repealed Roe v. Wade, for a young generation of women who's being socialized in this era, politically socialized in this era, these are having a big impact. The other thing to mention is the Me Too movement. These are having a big impact on their political socialization and how they are viewing the political landscape. And so these results are not shocking to me and make a lot of sense. I mean, obviously the gender gap,
has always been there overall. One kind of interesting thing was the gender gap narrowed when Biden was at the top of the ticket. But now with Harris at the top of the ticket, it's kind of gone back to status quo for Democrats. And part of the reason that it's gone back to status quo for Democrats and not even wider is because this group of young women who is becoming more liberal, as we discussed earlier in the podcast, they're less likely to vote. So they don't have as big an impact on the overall gender gap. But as we see with
Every generation, as you age, you become more likely to vote. Your vote likelihood goes up. So what I'm really interested in is this generation of very liberal young women, as they age and become more likely to vote, how does that impact the gender gap? And skeptics might say a lot of data suggests as people age, they also become more conservative. So that's another angle that we'll be paying attention to.
I agree with you. I think it would be really interesting to see what happens with this cohort as they age into the electorate, if you're talking about younger Gen Z teenagers that are not yet voters. But also, I mean, if you look at millennials, we don't see as much movement towards conservatives or Republicans among millennials as we have in previous generations. So this this you get more conservative as you age. Truism may not continue to be true yet to be seen.
One of the things I thought that was really interesting about this Gallup data is they had a table with a bunch of different policy positions and they showed the change among young men and young women from broadly speaking, like the Obama years to the Trump and Biden years. Those were the ways that they like bracketed out the survey data. So they had a bunch of different policy positions and showing the change between these two eras.
And young women had moved to the left on these policy positions, on all of them. I just calculated an average, right? Across all these policy positions, what are we seeing?
Women had moved to the left on average by around 11 or 12 points. Men had also moved to the left on this slate of policy positions by five or so points. But men are less willing to call themselves liberals, which I thought was just an interesting contrast, right? So while they may agree on some of the policy positions and be moving in the same direction, they're not comfortable with the word.
I saw that trend as well. And I think it has to do with the changing norms of what counts as liberal and conservative. So the area on which young men changed the most was same-sex marriage. But, I mean, if you look at the polling overall in America, it's like 70% of Americans support legal same-sex marriage. And it's even a majority of Republicans now. So they just may not see that anymore as being liberal, even though, yes, as a group, young men have moved to the left more
on the issue. So I think it's two things. It's one, men are maybe a little like view the liberal label less kindly, but also maybe moving to the left because the culture has moved to the left and not as a result, see themselves as a sort of different political identity. But I think in all of this, the most important question is, you know, like the why.
You mentioned some of these social movements and developments at the Supreme Court, political developments and the likes.
The areas on which we see the most change for women in terms of moving to a leftward position, number one was global warming, right? So between the Bush years and today, young women have moved 20 points to the left on the question of whether global warming is caused by human activity. Right.
on whether you would prioritize the environment over economic growth. Again, 20 points to the left. The U.S. is doing too little to protect the environment, nearly 20 points to the left. I mean, we're seeing movement amongst men here as well, but it's much more muted. It's like six points to the left or something like that. Then after climate change, you see abortion and then guns. So those were the top three issues on which young women have moved to the left.
I think we can understand legal abortion in the context of the Dobbs decision. I think maybe we can understand guns in the context of what going to school has been like, although I don't know why it would necessarily be gendered. So if you have thoughts, tell me. But the climate change thing is really interesting. Like, how is climate change gendered?
That's really interesting. I don't have a great answer to that, but I do think it's consistent with what we see, which is that political views tend to be clustered, right? Like when you're politically socialized, you tend to adopt many of the views of the party you're socialized into. So as you become more democratic, you tend to adopt more democratic views and vice versa. If you become a Republican, you tend to adopt some of the more standard Republican views. So you can imagine a world where you're thinking about these young women who are becoming more democratic and as
they learn more about abortion, about some of these other issues, they think, oh yeah, I agree with Democrats on more than just those things. I agree with them on guns. I agree with them on climate change. Now, my argument for guns is I think there's been a lot of movement in the gun control community, uh,
around this idea of like moms demand action and they're kind of mobilizing women and specifically targeting women. Those are women with children, but I do wonder if maybe some of that is filtering down to women without children. But that's just a theory that I don't have a lot of evidence to back up. I have a theory. Take it away, Mary. I read through this Gallup report multiple times. And what I came away thinking about was, I wonder if we can see gender differences in how young people are accessing information.
So I went to the Harvard Youth Study from earlier this year, from spring of this year, and they asked this question. This is among 18 to 29-year-olds. The Harvard Youth Study is one of the best polls in the country that really focuses on young people. They've been doing this for decades. And so this is just their most recent survey. They asked this question, which of the following, if any, do you regularly access for news and current event-related content? And they give a bunch of different options.
So I just looked at the difference between men and women in their survey. Women are nine points more likely to say they get news from TikTok than men. They're seven points more likely to say they get news from Instagram than men. They are four points more likely to say they get news from Facebook. They are 11 points less likely to say they get news from YouTube. They are five points less likely to say they get news from either Fox News or MSNBC. And they are four points less likely to say they get news from X or Twitter.
There's a huge gulf in the media landscape being consumed by young men and young women. You can see from this that women are getting their news and information mostly from social media sites.
And so why would that matter on something like the environment? If you're getting all your news from TikTok and Instagram and stuff like that, you're going to maybe see these posts of high profile women in these arenas. You're going to see Greta Thunberg. You're going to see Jane Fonda. Right. You're going to see these role models. Right.
whether you think they're modeling something good or bad, that's your own personal interpretation, but you're going to see high-profile women acting in these spaces that you're probably not going to see if you're getting your news from YouTube or Fox News. So this is my theory. It's that women and men are thinking about and accessing media completely differently, especially young women and men. I mean, I find it compelling. Write it up. Do a thesis. I'm not doing another dissertation. No, thank you.
You know, another thing when it comes to the why here is, you know, maybe it would have to do with education. Something like 60% of undergrads today are women. And so women are going to college and graduating both undergrad and postgrad degrees at significantly higher rates than men. So maybe it's just a difference in educational attainment. But it's not.
That is not actually the case. They compare moves to the left amongst college-educated and non-college-educated women under the age of 30, and there is zero difference in change. Not absolute sort of value, but change. In fact, if anything, non-college-educated women have moved slightly more to the left than college-educated women.
Again, also, they look at race as a potential difference. They compare white women with women of color. There's no difference there. They compare white men with men of color. There's pretty much no difference there. And so it really is something else in the water. It's not those usual suspects of, say, like education or religion.
And so maybe it's media. In looking through this, were there any other suspects that you came across? I couldn't identify anything else that I saw a big gender difference on that I think would be interesting.
would be causal here. I mean, Gallup pulled out these, these elements of, of race and education, but they didn't pull out any other factors. So it's, it's, I mean, without access to their raw data, it's pretty hard to assess if other demographic factors could be part of this. But I mean, I think if you buy the theory about media consumption, I think that does help explain why you would see pretty much the same thing based on education. I mean, I think college educated and non-college educated communities
People are using TikTok at the same rate, I would guess. You know, the other thing that I looked at some other polling from Change Research last year, they did polling with Teen Vogue of voters aged 18 to 29 about and they did a big report about their their immediate consumption. One of the other differences that you see between men and women is how actively they engage with media. So women tend to be more passive consumers.
passively responding to media versus men, which report actively seeking out information about certain news stories. And you do see some differences there by race. So Black women in particular tend to be pretty active in pursuing media. So it's a bit surprising that you don't see some difference based on race in Gallup's data. Yeah.
Just based on that alone. It's all really interesting stuff. And if this trend persists, Gen Z, I guess, is going to have to deal with, you know, a dating pool with significantly more moderate or conservative men than women. And to all of those folks, we see in the polling that increasingly people say they won't date across the political divide.
maybe reconsider, you know, see people as people or something like that, because I think, Jenzy, you might have a problem if you don't. Well, I wonder if ultimately what we see is that over time, the political opinions between men and women tend to converge somewhere. Now, where they converge...
to the women's perspective or the men's perspective. I don't know. Oh, I like how you're thinking. Real battle of the sexes. Who can sway, who can politically sway the other side? And we'll track it right here on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. We're going to leave it there for today. Thank you so much, Mary and Ruth. Thanks, Galen. Thanks for having me.
My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Tritavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or a review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you soon.