Earlier this summer, Gallup published some surprising numbers: more Americans identified as “socially conservative” than at any time in about a decade. Thirty-eight per cent said they were “conservative” or “very conservative” when it came to social issues, as opposed to 29% who said they were “liberal” or “very liberal”. A year earlier, 33% were on the conservative side, and 30% liberal.
What accounts for the rightward shift?
While these numbers tell us something interesting about personal identification, they don’t actually tell us all that much about policy. “Social issues” wasn’t defined by the Gallup pollsters, leaving respondents to interpret the term for themselves. But the line between “social issues” and “economic issues” isn’t all that clear. Is income inequality a social issue, an economic issue, or both? What about abortion, which has long been defined as a social issue, but has huge economic impacts for women and their families?
What primarily seems to be driving the change is the Biden era.
The last time we saw a similar peak in self-described social conservatism was in 2009, the year Barack Obama took office. Social conservatism hit a low in 2021, when Biden was inaugurated after a horrific and deadly pro-Trump insurrection brought national shame to the country and to the Republican party in particular.
But it has steadily ticked up since then. And the shift has been driven largely by Republicans, whose conservative/very conservative identification on social issues has grown by 14 points since 2021. Independents have shifted rightward on social issues by five points. Democrats have stayed steady.
Republicans, in other words, have doubled down on conservative identity now that their party is out of the White House. And that makes sense: being in the political opposition is often more motivating than being in charge, and feeling like your policy preferences are being sidelined can make you dig in harder than when you feel like you’re winning.
There’s also been an age-related shift. While most age groups, aside from those over 65 who stayed more or less even, shifted rightward, the biggest shift – 13 points – was among those aged 30 to 49 (50-to-64-year-olds shifted by 11 points, while adults under 30 moved to the right by six points). This, too, may not be all that surprising: one’s 30s and 40s are the years when many adults find themselves turning inwards, toward nuclear family and home life, which can be a conservatizing force (for women, marriage tends to create a shift to the right; having children, for both sexes, may do the same).
There’s actually not much evidence that Americans are growing more conservative when you break it down issue by issue. Support for abortion rights is at record highs, with even many Republicans wanting the government out of women’s uteruses. And Americans aren’t just more pro-choice broadly; they are now more likely to support abortion without restriction.
Support for LGBTQ rights is also widespread. Seventy-one per cent of Americans support same-sex marriage rights. Sixty-six per cent favor allowing trans people to serve in the military. And 93% say gay people and lesbians should have the same job opportunities and protections as straight people.
When it comes to guns, most Americans want stricter laws. And most Americans also say that more needs to be done to make racial equality a reality.
It’s clear that Americans are a more liberal bunch than can be captured by amorphous self-identity questions. One issue, though, is different: crime.
According to Gallup data from last year, 56% of Americans said there was more crime in their area than in the previous year – the highest percentage since Gallup began asking the question in 1972. And 78% said they believed crime was up nationwide. Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to believe crime was up, but 42% of Democrats believed crime in their area had risen. And most Democrats also believe that crime is up nationwide.
Perception, of course, is not reality. “Crime” is also one of those amorphous terms – are we talking about murders or porch pirates or wage theft, or all of the above? The numbers generally show that, while there was a spike in violent crime during Covid, crime remains lower than it was at its peak in the 1990s. But crime statistics are notoriously poorly tracked, which leaves us with limited data. And “things aren’t as bad as they were at the height of violent crime in modern America” isn’t exactly comforting.
People also tend to vote on perception, not data. If the general perception is that crime is rising, that can push voters to the right, as the Republican party has pretty firmly entrenched itself as the party of law and order. This is ironic, given that Republicans’ anything-goes stance on gun control fuels America’s endemic violence problem, but Republicans’ rhetoric on crime is much more aggressive than Democrats’. Republicans also tend to promote more policing and punitive measures in response to crime, while Democrats are more likely to push broader social investments, including in education and poverty alleviation.
When many Americans think about rising crime, what they’re really considering is the general sense of things being safe and orderly or not. A big part of what’s driving the perception of rapidly rising crime, I suspect, is the reality of increasingly visible social dysfunction: homelessness, addiction and anti-social behavior.
Since the pandemic, homelessness has surged, and there seems to be a higher number of visibly homeless people who are struggling with mental health disorders, substance abuse disorders or both. In New York City, there has been an 18% increase in the number of people who are sleeping on the streets and in the subways, and for the first time ever the city’s homeless population passed 100,000. The San Francisco Bay Area has seen a 35% rise in homelessness since 2019. Los Angeles has seen its homeless population increase by more than 40% since 2018. Maricopa county, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, has seen its homeless population increase by 72% since 2017.
Large west coast cities are plagued by tent encampments, which are often sites of gang activity, illicit drug use and deadly overdoses, sexual violence and crime more broadly. The folks sleeping rough are not the majority of people who are unhoused on any given night, but they are a group that reads as homeless, erratic, potentially dangerous and reflective of broader social malaise. That read may not be kind or fair and accurate, but perceptions rarely are.
Adding to the general sense of insecurity and instability are surging drug overdoses and the more amorphous sense – backed up with some data – that people are just acting erratically and badly in all kinds of new and disturbing ways. All of this may be combined into a general sense of “things are bad and seem to be coming apart at the seams” which can manifest as “crime is getting worse” – which in turn can drive people to the right if they don’t think Democrats and liberals are responsive to their concerns.
And unfortunately, while mainstream Democrats do largely recognize that crime and concern for general order and stability is a problem, a lot of liberal pundits and people in media, and even some elected officials, deny and deflect. One way to drive people who share your values away from your party and your ideology is to deny what they can see with their own eyes.
Luckily, there are a long list of issues that Democrats win on, and voters may be more inclined to vote for politicians who promise to protect the environment, reproductive rights and democracy itself than those who say they’ll “do something” about homelessness (especially if more voters understand that “something” has to be housing) or “get tough” on crime (especially if voters are exhausted by a system of brutal incarceration that doesn’t actually solve the problem).
It is a problem for Democrats, though – and for progressive movement-building – if more Americans consider themselves socially conservative, whether their policy preferences perfectly line up with the Republican party or not. The latest numbers may just be a blip, spurred on by conservatives who feel victimized by a Democratic administration.
But liberals are already at a disadvantage in a country where only a small minority – roughly one in five – has said for the last 20 years that they are liberal on economic issues, while 40% to 50% have consistently said they’re economically conservative. Republicans don’t represent a majority on policy, but conservatism seems to have a better brand than liberalism: while 40% of Americans say they’re conservative, just 26% say they’re liberal.
That doesn’t necessary mean Democrats will always lose elections. But it is bad news for the majority of us who value liberal democracy and want to build a fairer, healthier, safer society.
Jill Filipovic is the author of the The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness
