In the days following Kamala Harris securing the delegates needed to become the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, anonymous aides began walking back many of the more progressive positions she took during the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.
Whereas in 2019, Harris told MSNBC, “We have to have a buyback program, and I support a mandatory gun buyback program,” an unnamed “campaign official” told reporters in 2024 that Harris still supports an “assault weapons” ban but “not a requirement to sell them to the federal government.”
On the environment, Harris told CNN in 2019, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking. We have to just acknowledge that the residual impact of fracking is enormous in terms of the impact on the health and safety of communities.” Fast-forward to 2024 and another unnamed “campaign official” told reporters that Harris “will not seek to ban fracking if she’s elected president.”
And on immigration, Harris, along with every other 2019 Democratic presidential nominee on the debate stage other than Joe Biden, agreed with the statement, “It should be a civil offense rather than a crime to cross the border without documentation.” Now, Harris is singing a different tune, or at least her campaign is. Asked if she still supported decriminalizing illegal border crossings, a campaign spokesperson told reporters, “The Vice President’s position is the same as the administration’s — unauthorized border crossings are illegal.”
Why did Harris take all of these radical positions, positions that are opposed by the vast majority of voters?
It may be because these are the positions of the fastest-growing demographic in the Democratic Party: young, single women.
More than any other demographic, it is young, single women who have been radicalized in the past decade, and they are driving the Democratic Party far to the left on the issues they care about the most.
As recently as 2007, young men and women were not that far apart politically. According to Gallup, just 28% of young women aged 18 to 29 considered themselves “liberal” in 2007 compared to 25% of young men the same age. That’s just a 3-point gap between the sexes. Fast-forward to 2024, however, and now 40% of women aged 18 to 29 consider themselves liberal compared to an unchanged 25% of men the same age. That is a 15-point chasm!
Over the same time frame, the percentage of women over 30 who consider themselves liberal inched up from 20% to 27%, while men over 30 saw some movement from 16% to 20%. So overall, women did become more liberal, but younger women, in particular, moved much further to the left than anyone else.
Gallup also drilled down and identified which issues young women were radicalizing on the most. Those turned out to be abortion, the environment, guns, and immigration. On the environment, for example, as recently as 2016, just 59% of young women said the United States should prioritize the environment over economic growth, compared to 54% of young men who said the same thing. But now 78% of young women say we should prioritize the environment over the economy, a jump of almost 20 points!
Similar large lurches leftward can be seen on abortion (the percentage of young women agreeing that “abortion should be legal under any/most circumstances” is up 18 points), on guns (the percentage of young women agreeing that “gun laws should be more strict” is up 16 points), and immigration (the percentage of young women agreeing that “immigration levels should be increased” is up 12 points).
Women over 30 moved left on these issues, too, over the same time — but at less than half the rate young women did. And on some issues, such as guns, young men have actually moved slightly to the right.
Not only are young women far to the left of the rest of the nation, but they are far more politically active as well. They are more likely to vote than their male counterparts, and they are more likely to volunteer for, and donate money to, political candidates. No wonder Harris was so eager to pander to their political views.
Why are young women moving so far left so fast? The answer is not, as many might suspect, education. While college-educated women are more liberal than women who did not go to college, the percentage of young women who go to college has not changed much in the last 10 years, hovering around 60%. Also, according to Gallup, the move leftward among young women can be seen in both the college-educated and non-college-educated demographics. Meanwhile, for women over 30, both college-educated and non-college-educated alike, there has not been a strong movement toward the left. This really seems to be a movement isolated to the current generation of young women, regardless of education.
It is hard not to notice that the political radicalization of young women coincided with the ascension of Donald Trump. Danielle Stephenson of Oakland, California, told Claire Cain Miller that Trump absolutely was a major part of the reason she became so politically active.
“It was the most disillusioning thing to have that experience, not just as a woman in America but as a girl becoming a woman,” Stephenson said of watching Hillary Clinton lose to Trump in 2016. “Even though it was this crushing disappointment, I’m honestly really glad that it happened because it made me feel angry in a really productive way.”
Turning anger about Trump into political activism for far-left Democratic candidates may help some young women cope temporarily, but it does not seem to be a sustainable path to happiness. In addition to being the most liberal and the most politically active demographic, young women are also far more anxious and depressed than their male counterparts and far more depressed and anxious than previous generations of young women. And it is the most liberal young women who are the most anxious and depressed. Young conservative women are far more likely to be happy than their liberal counterparts.
No matter what happens this November, the question going forward is, will this generation of far-left young women stay as liberal as they are today, or will they eventually moderate? In previous generations, women usually become more conservative once they get married and more conservative yet again once they have children.
For a Republican Party that is worried about single, young women voting for Democrats in landslide proportions, the answer is to get as many of them married as possible — and fast!
For Democrats, the opposite is true. The less a woman is connected to a husband and children, the more that woman is connected to the Democratic Party. In this sense, Harris is the ideal role model for Democratic young women. She prioritized her career over family until the age of 50 before finally settling down.
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Unfortunately for Republicans, the percentage of people who live in a household led by a married couple is at an all-time low and is falling. Men and women are waiting longer to get married, and more of them aren’t getting married at all.
And that is just what the Democratic Party wants.