Report: High School Boys Trending Conservative

High school senior boys are nearly twice as likely to say they are conservative than liberal, while high school girls continue to drift leftward, the Hill reported, citing a federal survey of American youth.

“In annual surveys over the last three years, roughly one-quarter of high school seniors self-identified as conservative or ‘very conservative’ on the Monitoring the Future survey, a scholarly endeavor that dates to the 1970s. Only 13 percent of boys identified as liberal or very liberal in those years,” according to the report. “The figures represent a striking shift in the political views of boys. As recently as the late 2000s, liberal boys occasionally outnumbered conservatives. Back in the Carter era, both boys and girls leaned liberal.”

Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, said his organization has played a role in spreading conservative values to young people across the country.

“Turning Point USA has been focused for years with the only high school field program with over 50 field organizers and close to 1,000 chartered chapters,” Kirk told Breitbart News on Monday. “This unprecedented investment is paying generational dividends.”

At the same time, surveys show young girls drifting further and further left politically as boys make strides toward the right. A University of Michigan survey from last year cited in the report found that the share of high school senior girls who identified as liberal increased from 19 percent in 2012 to 30 percent in 2022. Twelve percent of the girls in the survey identified as conservative.

Young women between the ages of 18 to 29 are also “more likely to identify as liberal now than at any time in the past two decades, according to Gallup surveys.”

“Young women are almost twice as likely as young men to claim the liberal tag, a widening gender gap in political beliefs,” according to the report. “The political leanings of young men have changed little over the past two decades, according to an analysis by the Survey Center on American Life. Last year, 43 percent of young men identified as moderate, 31 percent as conservative and 24 percent as liberal. Twenty years earlier, the numbers were more or less the same.”

The report cites NBC News polling from 2022, which found that Generation Z favors liberalism over conservatism by a 48-33 margin. The report notes that “the leftward drift of young women alone has sufficed to move the needle on young adults as a whole,” and that ten years prior, young adults were split evenly between left and right. 

“The rightward drift of high school boys is comparatively subtle,” the report notes. “Indeed, when it comes to politics, most boys seem reluctant to pick a side.”

The 2022 Monitoring the Future survey found that more than two-fifths of high school senior boys claimed no politics at all with answers to the liberal-conservative question as “none of the above” or “I don’t know.” Roughly one-fifth identified as moderate. 

As for the political divide emerging between high school girls and boys, the battle between traditional masculinity and modern feminism could be partially responsible, said Delano Squires, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. 

“I believe that traditional notions of masculinity are much more accepted within conservatism,” while feminist values “are clearly one of the driving forces of liberalism,” Squires told the outlet. “I could see male and female students saying, ‘I’m choosing sides.’ Do you want matriarchy, or do you want patriarchy?”