President Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to an all-time low, and no demographic is less likely to approve of him than young women. According to the Spring Yale Youth Poll, Trump’s approval rating among women ages 18 to 22 is underwater by 54 points, compared with a net negative 16-point rating among Americans overall.
Interestingly, however, young men are not nearly so down on the 47th president. Young men have just a 27 -point net negative rating of Trump, and that 27-point gap between young men and women is the largest gap between men and women of any age cohort.
Gallup released similar findings last year, showing that, as recently as 2001, there was just a 3-point gap between the percentage of women between the ages of 18 and 29 who identified as being liberal (28%) and men of the same age (25%). Fast forward 24 years, and today the percentage of young men who identify as liberal is an identical 25%, while the percentage of women identifying as liberal has shot up to 40%.
What is driving young women so far left?
It is most likely not one factor, but several that are reinforcing each other.
First, social media no doubt plays a role. The algorithms that compete for our attention are known to feed men and women wildly different content, and the political content they do feed us is designed not only to reinforce our existing beliefs but also to drive an emotional response, most often a negative one.
Then there is the fact that young women today are not only more likely to go to college than past generations, but they are also more likely to go than men the same age. And colleges today are far more uniformly left-wing than they have been in the past. Not only are professors today more uniformly liberal than in the past, but the culture on campuses has become more left-wing as well.
There are also ideological currents within modern progressivism that encourage young women, particularly young white women, to understand themselves less as individuals and more as members of an aggrieved class. One of the most influential is “intersectionality,” a theory first developed by law professor Kimberle Crenshaw. Intersectionality originally examined how discrimination can operate across overlapping categories, such as race and sex, rather than through only one category at a time.
Crenshaw’s argument was rooted in legal analysis. A black woman alleging discrimination, for example, could be left without recourse if an employer defended itself by noting that it had hired black men and white women. The point was that black women could face a form of discrimination not fully captured by either race or sex alone. But in popular political culture, intersectionality has often become something cruder: a hierarchy of victimhood in which moral authority is assigned according to how many marginalized identities a person can claim.
That framework gives young white women an incentive to emphasize identities that move them higher on the liberal ladder. Identifying primarily as women gives them a claim to disadvantage they would not have if judged by race alone. Shedding Christian identification and adopting a bisexual or otherwise nontraditional sexual identity can move them further still. And that is broadly consistent with recent trends: Young women are less likely than previous generations to identify with organized religion and more likely to identify as bisexual.
The decline in marriage is also playing a role. Women of all ages are far less likely to be married today than in the past, and this is particularly true of young women. Single women are more likely to experience politics as women, whereas married women are more likely to experience politics through the household. Marriage “institutionalizes” a woman’s partnership with a man, which can shift her perceived self-interest away from women as a group and toward the family unit. A married woman is simply far less likely to interpret politics through a male-female lens, because her daily life is organized around cooperation with, not competition against, a man.
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Finally, it can’t be ignored that women, particularly liberal women, are far more likely to end friendships over politics than other demographics. A 2021 Survey Center on American Life poll found that 33% of liberal women had stopped being friends with someone because of politics, higher than any other group and more than triple the rate among conservatives. The pressure to conform to liberal political views among young women is, therefore, particularly strong.
Young women are not moving left because of one issue or one man. They are moving left because nearly every institution shaping their lives — social media, college, identity politics, delayed marriage, and friendship networks — frames gender relations as a struggle for power rather than a basis for partnership.