CV NEWS FEED // A recent Gallup poll found that Americans are growing increasingly more likely to identify as liberal in their views on social and economic issues, a change driven exclusively by Democrats in the last 20 years.
The poll, which was conducted in May, found that 32% of Americans said their views on social issues were conservative, 32% said their views were moderate, and 33% said liberal. By contrast, Gallup reported that from 1999 to 2008, those who identified as liberal on social issues made up only a quarter or less of the poll’s respondents, while conservatives and moderates made up a third or more.
“Despite some fluctuation over time, liberal identification on social issues has gradually increased, while conservative and moderate identification has each gradually decreased slightly,” Gallup reported.
Though 39% of respondents said that their views on economic issues were conservative, while only 23% responded as liberal, Gallup reported that Americans have overall become more likely to identify as liberal in economics. Just over one-third of respondents identified as moderate.
“As liberal ideology on economic issues has become a bit more common in the U.S., moderate and conservative views are each down slightly compared with Gallup’s earliest measures in the late 1990s and early 2000s,” Gallup added.
Gallup found that the trend towards liberal views on both social and economic issues is entirely driven by Democrats, as Republicans and independents are no more or less likely to identify as liberal on the same issues as they were 10 or 20 years ago.
However, Democrats’ tendency to identify as liberal on social issues has risen by 30 points since 2004, while in regards to economic issues, it has nearly doubled.
“Compared with 2004 and 2014, Republicans have become more conservative and Democrats have become more liberal in their views on both social and economic issues, but not at the same rate,” Gallup reported. “As the ideological makeup of political independents has remained steady, the liberalization of Democratic views has altered the national averages on both social and economic issues.”
Gallup continued:
Americans’ views on economic matters, broadly, still lean more conservative than liberal, despite a growing number of Americans who identify as economically liberal. However, in the wake of landmark changes on LGBTQ+ rights, legalization of marijuana in much of the country, and the Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe v. Wade, the nation is now less conservative than in the past on social issues, with equal shares identifying as liberal, moderate and conservative.
