At least 7 in 10 young women, regardless of their political stances, agree that children should wait until adulthood to undergo gender transition and that violent criminals should not be released on bail, according to a poll from a right-leaning women’s advocacy group.
The Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women and the polling firm KAConsulting surveyed 800 women aged 18-24 in an online panel from Jan. 31 to Feb. 6. Of the respondents, 36% identified as Democrats or Democrat-leaning, 24% as Republicans or Republican-leaning, 22% as independents and 17% as “other/unsure.”
Overall, 79% agreed with the statement “releasing violent criminals without bail does not make a community safer,” 74% supported children attending the school of their choice regardless of ZIP code and 71% said children should wait for adulthood “before having irreversible sex-change surgeries.”
“There’s a remarkable amount of agreement on family and safety matters,” Kimberly Begg, president of the Clare Boothe Luce Center, told The Washington Times. “But there’s still a lot of division over abortion and firearms.”
Due to the small number of self-described Republican women on college campuses, pollsters separately surveyed an “oversample” of 300 GOP-identifying women for comparison. Those Republican women proved far more likely than others to embrace conservative positions.
Differences were sharpest on abortion, illegal immigration, gun violence and transgender rights:
• 52% overall disagreed with the statement that there are more than two genders; 88% of Republican respondents disagreed.
• 62% overall agreed with the statement that it is “unfair to have biological males who identify as women competing in female sports with biological women”; 90% of Republicans agreed.
• 31% overall said abortion should be “legal for any reason, but not after five months of pregnancy when the fetus is viable and can feel pain.” But 35% of Republicans said abortion should only be legal in cases of “rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.”
• 5% overall said “mass illegal immigration” is the main domestic threat; 19% of Republicans agreed.
• 28% overall said gun violence is their top concern; 8% of Republicans agreed.
Michelle Easton, who retired as president of the Luce Center this month to become chairman of its board, said those gaps reflect a growing hostility toward conservative values on college campuses.
“What’s happened today is the left doesn’t even want to hear other points of view,” Ms. Easton told The Times. “If you host a conservative speaker, especially a woman, they do anything to stop you. It’s beyond belief.”
She pointed to Riley Gaines, a former collegiate swimmer who has sued the NCAA to keep transgender athletes out of women’s sports. Last year, campus protesters tried to prevent Ms. Gaines from giving a lecture that the Luce Center co-sponsored at Grand Valley State University, a public campus in Michigan.
A former Education Department official under the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, Ms. Easton founded the conservative advocacy group in 1993. She named it after the late Clare Boothe Luce, who served as a Republican congresswoman in the 1940s and U.S. ambassador to Italy in the Eisenhower administration.
“I think that more young women are trending, perhaps unconsciously, toward conservative attitudes and principles,” Ms. Easton said. “They really are more conservative than liberal, despite how the media portrays them.”
However, Gallup reported last month that the share of women aged 18 to 29 who identified as liberal rose by 11 percentage points in an annual poll, from 29% in 1999 to 40% last year.
What’s more, Vanessa Otero, CEO of Ad Fontes, a for-profit company that rates the bias of more than 3,000 multimedia news sources, faulted the Luce poll for posing biased and misleading questions.
She noted that while the survey found 50% of young women identified as “feminist” and 82% identified as feminine, it did not ask whether they favored one over the other.
“Most of the questions are worded in a way that uses baseline factual assumptions that are not shared by non-conservatives, so it appears to be a leap to conclude that … most women do or don’t support specific policies,” Ms. Otero told The Times.
Kellyanne Conway, a former Luce Center board member who founded KAConsulting in 2021 after leaving her position as a counselor in the Trump White House, led the survey. Its margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
Polling guru Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com rated KAConsulting as 91% accurate in predicting the outcomes of congressional and gubernatorial races during the 2021-22 midterm election cycle, despite noting an average 3.9% polling bias toward Republicans.
“Overall, young women favor the term ‘feminine’ to ‘feminist,’” Ms. Conway said in a statement on the poll. “Despite differing opinions, young women value their identity as women over ideology.”
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.