Greeting! I am writing in response to Louis Cannon’s two-part column, which quotes extensively from a piece of mine in the Kentucky Lantern.
Dear Mr. Cannon,
Thank you for drawing extensively on my Kentucky Lantern column (and linking the piece) in your own discussion of the gender gap in politics.
I apologize that you could not access the Financial Times source on which I drew. The reason I linked to that source, when usually I link to the actual study, is that weirdly the Financial Times piece includes graphs that the Survey Center on American Life itself didn’t have in their report:
Also, the Center itself later posted a version of the U.S. graph:
But that piece is not the only evidence of a sharp leftward shift in Democratic policy preferences that kicked in part-way into the 21st Century. Few of these studies divide the results by sex, but we do know that women are more likely to be Democrats. Either way, though, the change wasn’t gradual. In terms of policy/ideology, something major began happening around 15 years ago.
For example, from fivethirtyeight.com:
Similarly, one of the big issues dividing the parties is immigration.
You can see that the leftward shift on that issue among Democrats is pretty recent:
And the Harvard Kennedy Center… describing this trend… specifically discusses the recent leftward shift among young adults.
Hope some of this helps Mr. Cannon with later columns.
Best regards,
Stephen
D. Stephen Voss is an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, where he has worked since 1998.