Nate Silver: The Liberal-Conservative Happiness Gap is Real

We’ve talked about this topic before but as Nate Silver points out today, it probably gets less attention than it should. Let’s just start with the chart so you can refer back to it. As the legend indicates, this is a 0-100 point scale where 100 is “excellent” and 0 is “poor.” As you can see, conservatives are significantly happier than liberals in every subcategory of gender, race, age and education.

OK, not even sure where to begin with this one! But here’s an attempt at a deeper dive at understanding why conservatives are so much happier than liberals. Mostly looking at how persistent the gap is in survey data rather than extrapolating too much. pic.twitter.com/qV59d3kxuJ

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) June 18, 2025

And the chart keeps going with a look at income, religion, marriage, sexual orientation and political activity. 

One thing I think we can say is that the correlation isn’t spurious. Age and religiosity matter a lot — religious people are happier, younger people are sadder — but the liberal/conservative gap outweighs almost all other characteristics except age. pic.twitter.com/QPG0RRZ1zy

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) June 18, 2025

Here’s a bit of what Silver has to say about these results which come from a large survey with 60,000 respondents.

I’m going to show you a very long chart, where I translated the five choices that the CES provided to a 100-point scale: 0 for “poor” mental health, 25 for “fair”, 50 for “good”, 75 for “very good” and 100 for “excellent”. The average American self-reports at a 60 on this scale: in other words, somewhere between good and very good mental health. But liberals average a score of 53 and conservatives a 68.

He then looks at some specific categories:

Gender. Men report slightly higher mental health than women, although it isn’t really a big gap until you get into the younger age cohorts. However, political attitudes are more predictive. Conservative women report considerably higher happiness (66) than liberal men (58)…

Education and income. Consistent with a large body of research, having more money does make people happier, at least up to a point. Still, conservatives with household incomes of $30,000 or lower report the same mental health (60) as liberals making $100,000 or more…

Sexual orientation. I’m not going to kick a hornet’s nest by delving too deeply into “LGBTQ+” identity, but you do see some interesting differences here. Gay men and lesbians report somewhat lower happiness than heterosexuals overall, but conservative gays and lesbians report higher happiness than heterosexual liberals. Liberals who describe themselves as bisexual or having some “other” sexual orientation report notably low happiness, however.

It’s interesting to speculate about why this data looks the way it does. One way to approach it is to look at the lowest figures along the left edge. In other words, where are liberals the least happy?

The two that really standout are one age category: Gen Z (40% score for liberals) and one sexual orientation category: Bisexual or other (35% score for liberals). Why are young liberals and bisexual liberals so unhappy? Hard to say but clearly there’s a major element of political identification at play. After all Gen Z conservatives rate a 56 and Bisexual conservatives rate a 59 (a 24 point gap). 

Looking over the other low points for liberals we find those who report their race as “Other or mixed,” those with household incomes below $30,000 and those who never had children. Also worth mentioning: atheists and people with “some college” but no degree.

Some of these things (never having kids, low income, some college) seem to overlap with being young. Are young people unhappy because they a) can’t find a partner and b) can’t find a job? That would make sense of a lot of this. It also matches up with some other data. For instance, Pew has reported that the number of young people who marry is declining.

 As relationships, living arrangements and family life continue to evolve for American adults, a rising share are not living with a romantic partner. A new Pew Research Center analysis of census data finds that in 2019, roughly four-in-ten adults ages 25 to 54 (38%) were unpartnered – that is, neither married nor living with a partner.1 This share is up sharply from 29% in 1990.2 Men are now more likely than women to be unpartnered, which wasn’t the case 30 years ago.

The growth in the single population is driven mainly by the decline in marriage among adults who are at prime working age.

Being young, alone and having an unfinished degree and poor job prospects certainly seems like a reason to be unhappy. But why are liberals so much less happy than conservatives?

Here Nate Silver suggests there are three broad ways to interpret the data. The one friendliest to liberals is to assume they are less happy because they are so empathetic and conscientious that they are dragged down by other people who are struggling. By contrast, conservatives are happy because they are selfish. That’s a theory I think a lot of liberals believe.

A slightly more neutral theory Silver proposes is that people who feel oppressed identity as liberals because they believe in the need for progress. And finally, he offers a take less friendly to liberals:

As Matt Yglesias suggested in his post “Why are young liberals so depressed?”, there may be a performative aspect to this. Liberals may express negative sentiment as a sign of solidarity with a movement that thinks there is profound injustice in the world. But then this can snowball — misery loves company — while attracting some number of people who face serious mental health challenges.

I’ve written about Yglesias’ take before and I think it’s undeniable that there is a strain of modern liberalism/progressivism which valorizes misery and which sees depressive affect as proof of ideological commitment. 

If the foundations of your movement are a) the belief that humans are destroying the planet past the point of no return, b) the belief that everyone is racist and all of society is designed to oppress minorities, c) the belief that women are victims of the patriarchy who are one short step from the Handmaid’s tale and d) the forces of evil are ascendant in America—buy into all of that and you’re probably not going to be a happy-go-lucky person. 

In fact, it’s incumbent on you to be miserable if you want to join this group. After all, the unifying message of sneering Swedish teenagers, Ibram Kendi and his army of DEI trainers, a prestige TV show based on a silly feminist novel and 24/7 reports on MSNBC is that everything is awful and getting worse all the time. If you’re not miserable, you’re not really one of them.

No wonder then that the youngest liberals are the least happy of all. They aren’t old enough or experienced enough to know that much of what the left says isn’t worth building your life around. They’ll figure it out eventually. Indeed, many of them seem to have already come around in the last election.