Ninety-one percent.
That’s the share of young liberal women who oppose deportations of illegal immigrants. In a country where 61% of voters support deportation efforts, one demographic has positioned itself further from the American mainstream than any other group in modern polling.
This hasn’t shown itself in just one issue. It’s a pattern. And understanding it explains a lot about our current political dysfunction.
The Empathy Paradox
The inversion here is striking. White young liberal women oppose deportations at 94%. Their non-white counterparts? Eighty-three percent opposed.
The women who look least like the people being deported hold the strongest opposition. The women who share ethnic backgrounds with many deportees are 11 points less absolute in their position.
We’re not measuring empathy. We’re measuring ideology. The positions don’t correlate with proximity to the issue. They correlate inversely with it.
Women 55 and older support deportations 66-27. Men of all ages support them by similar margins. But women under 55 flip to 42-53 opposition. Drill into that cohort and you find young liberal women driving the entire gender gap single-handedly.
A chasm separates them from the general electorate. It goes beyond disagreement to being in a parallel universe.
The Algorithm Did This
Values didn’t change generationally. Your grandmother and your 28-year-old cousin both believe in fairness, family, and compassion. What changed is information architecture.
Forty percent of young liberal women are highly online, 40% are watching national broadcast news, and a third get news from TikTok. They’re triple-dosing on media that reinforces identical narratives from different platforms.
Compare that to the general electorate: only 8% use TikTok as a news source. When one group’s primary information channel differs from everyone else’s by a factor of four, they’re not seeing the same country.
TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t inform. It radicalizes. It finds what triggers your emotions and feeds you more of it until a policy position becomes an identity marker and an identity marker becomes a moral absolute. The platform rewards the most extreme version of any argument because extremity drives engagement.
White young liberal women index even higher on TikTok news consumption than their non-white peers. The algorithm has sorted them into an informational ghetto where enforcement of immigration law isn’t a policy question but a human rights atrocity, and where anyone who disagrees isn’t wrong but evil.
The Minnesota Warning
Abstract polling becomes concrete crisis in Minnesota.
Gov. Tim Walz built an administration responsive to this demographic’s priorities. Sanctuary policies. Limited cooperation with federal enforcement. Social services without status verification. The activist class got all it wished for.
Then came the consequences. Federal agents on Minneapolis streets. A state government in open conflict with federal authority. National attention for all the wrong reasons. The policies that polled well in progressive echo chambers collided with the democratic will of a nation that sees the issue completely differently.
This is what happens when one ideologically isolated group captures institutional power disproportionate to its numbers. The 8% were louder than the 92%. They dominated the spaces where Democrat politicians seek approval. They set the terms of acceptable discourse within their coalition.
But democracy doesn’t work by decibel level. Eventually, majorities assert themselves, whether at the ballot box or through federal enforcement actions that override state resistance. Minnesota is experiencing that correction in real time.
Untethered
The deeper question isn’t about immigration. It’s about epistemology.
How do you share a country with fellow citizens who experience a fundamentally different reality? Not different values. Different facts. Different base assumptions about what is happening and why.
Young liberal women believe they’re more informed than other demographics. They consume more news. They engage more with current events. By every self-reported metric, they’re “paying attention.”
But information volume isn’t information quality. Watching multiple sources that agree with each other isn’t balance. Engaging deeply with content designed to confirm your priors isn’t research. That’s called reinforcement.
The gap between this demographic and everyone else will determine elections, shape policy fights, and strain institutions for the next decade.
These women vote at high rates. They staff nonprofits and newsrooms. They run social media accounts for major organizations. Their reality distortion field isn’t confined to their own lives. It shapes the information environment for everyone else.
Somewhere between the 91% opposition and the 61% support lies a conversation America needs to have. One where proximity to an issue matters more than ideological purity. Where empathy gets balanced against practical wisdom. Where disagreement doesn’t equal evil.
The polling is clear about where the isolation lives. The only question is whether anyone trapped in that bubble will ever see these numbers, or whether the algorithm will make sure they never do.
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