The great divide?

 A couple of weeks ago, Thomas Edsall had a column called "The gender gap is now a gender gulf," which said that there was growing divergence between the political views of young men and young women.    He discussed some people who offered explanations, but didn't give much evidence that it was actually happening, so I went to the GSS.  I divided people into three age groups (18-34, 35-59, and 60+) and used self-rating on a liberal/conservative scale as a summary of political views.

There's a lot of sampling error in the estimates for individual years, so I also show smoothed curves.  Young men have been more conservative than young women since the early 1980s--there may have been some increase in the gap through 2021, but nothing dramatic.  But in 2022, something happened--young men became much more conservative.  In 2021, 24% of young men said they were liberal or extremely liberal and 12% that they were conservative or extremely conservative; in 2022, the numbers flipped (14% liberal and 25% conservative).  The difference is too large to be plausibly explained by sampling error.  

  Here is the corresponding figure for people aged 35-59 (the y-scales are the same in order to make it easier to compare them).  Men are consistently a little more conservative (for some reason I switched the colors), and the gap hasn't changed much.  Men were more conservative in 2022 than in 2021, but the difference was small enough to be just sampling error.  

For people aged 60 and up, there is a small gap, which may be increasing, but 2022 does not stand out.  

So there's some support for Edsall's claim (which surprised me--large shifts involving subgroups are unusual).  But it just appeared in 2022, so it can't reasonably be explained by long-term social changes like the loss of factory jobs.  And nothing unusual was visible in 2016, 2018, or 2021, so it's not a general reaction to Trump.  The most obvious novel thing in 2022 was increased attention to abortion because of the Dobbs decision, but that would suggest a leftward movement among young women rather than a rightward movement among young men.  I looked at a number of other political views, and found one other case of a large shift among young men between 2021 and 2022.  Support for capital punishment increased from 48% to 65% among young men, against only 46% to 51% among young women.  You'd expect opinions among younger people to be more flexible, and it seems plausible that men might be more inclined to turn to "get tough" policies when crime is increasing.  (Serious crime fell from 2021 to 2022, but perceptions tend to lag behind reality, and opinions are also affected by a general sense of disorder).  Of course, it's possible that I'm just picking out a large chance variation, but it seems like it's worth further investigation.