FAMILY FEUD — New research suggests a fascinating trend with implications for politics — and family dinners: Daughters from conservative families are voting for Democrats at levels much higher than sons. According to an extensive 2023 survey of over 5,000 Americans from the Survey Center on American Life, most children with politically engaged parents end up with similar political beliefs. But daughters of Republicans have become a notable exception. Only 44 percent of young women raised in Republican households continued to identify as a Republican, compared to 67 percent of young men. The results inspire a natural question — how come Republican parents are raising Democratic daughters? Pollster Daniel Cox — the director of the Survey Center on American life, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to studying changes in American cultural and political life — has come up with some theories. So we asked him about his findings and conclusions. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. In writing about your findings, you mention four reasons why daughters of Republican parents might turn liberal — LGBTQ identity, abortion, higher education and Donald Trump’s Republican Party. Can you explain how you landed on those? And does one of those in particular stand out above the others to you? This wasn’t an attempt to be exhaustive. But I looked at what the issues are that are most salient during formative years, when young women are making sense of the political world and looking at the political parties to sort of see where their views align. Our surveys found that after the overturn of Roe, there was a huge increase in concern about abortion among young women. In our pre-election survey in 2022, we found that no issue is more important to young women than abortion — far more than the general public. So that is something that I think will continue to be an important issue and an important dividing line between young women — a largely pro-choice group — and where the GOP is. I don’t see that changing in the near future. Given that research, are young women who grew up in Republican households growing up to be Democrats a more modern problem for the GOP? In some ways, at least in American society, young people tend to be more left-leaning than older folks. So parents tend to be a little bit more conservative than their children. And that’s largely due to the fact that overall, research suggests that we’re moving to the left on a whole host of different issues, from marijuana legalization to same sex marriage to views about racial inequality, gender inequality. So, I think that is part of it; we are seeing this significant generation gap. But for women in particular on the issue of abortion, it’s not just that it’s more salient, surveys show that actually young people are more supportive of legal abortion than they were a generation ago. Gen-Z is far, far more supportive of legal abortion than previous generations, and young women are leading the way there in terms of expressing the highest levels of support. So then what do you feel like these numbers suggest about future partisan lean among women? It suggests a widening gap between young men and young women. If in conservative households daughters are becoming more independent or Democratic and sons are maintaining their parents’ political affinities, if that continues on then we could see the political divide between young men and young women increase. I’ve seen that in my own research. But that’s just sort of one piece of the puzzle. Young women are also about twice as likely to identify as LGBTQ than men. So, many young women are not [just] more supportive of rights for transgender people and same sex marriage, they identify that way, or they have close friends who do. That has a really powerful impact on how they understand their political beliefs. I’ve seen some back and forth between political scientists as to whether the partisan gap between men and women is increasing. On balance, I think the evidence is pretty strongly showing that young women are becoming more liberal. But it’s not as clear what’s happening with young men. I chalk some of this up to feelings of apathy among young men. When we looked at a whole number of issues, including ones that are supposed to be very salient for young people — so gun violence, climate change, cost of education — young women tend to care more about those issues than young men. Are there any kind of specific predictors as to when somebody is more likely to abandon their parents’ political beliefs? When parents are consistently either voting or espousing one type of beliefs, whether they’re conservative or liberal, their children are much more likely to adopt those views. To the extent that politics is something that the family talks about, and discusses regularly, children are more likely to share their parents’ political views. Conversely, in households where adults express political ambivalence or apathy, it’s much more likely for the child to not have corresponding political beliefs. And if the quality of the child-parent relationship is poor, say in an abusive household, those ties also won’t be as strong. There’s also plenty of other examples of lived experience mattering — say you’re a gay or lesbian young adult and you were raised in a conservative Christian household, your experience may well be at odds with your parents’ perspectives and political beliefs. All those things matter. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh. Programming Note: We’ll be off on Monday for President’s Day, but we’ll be back in your inboxes on Tuesday, Feb. 20.
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