My colleague John Burn-Murdoch recently presented striking evidence of a new trend: young men and young women are becoming politically segregated. Young men now sit substantially to the right of young women on the political spectrum. This is an international phenomenon and it’s new.
Should we be surprised? Society seems to be polarising along every possible axis and on every conceivable issue. Consider the apparently simple question of how the US economy is faring. The answer is simple: it depends whether the sitting president is on your team or not. Little else matters.
From the public’s perspective anyway. According to Gallup, Democrats are 57 percentage points more likely than Republicans to say that the economy is improving. Wind back four years, to early 2020 when Donald Trump rather than Joe Biden was president, and you find a very similar gap: 54 percentage points. Back then, naturally, it was the Republicans who believed the economy was improving.