Women are more likely to register to vote and to actually vote than men. They are also more likely to boycott and sign petitions and volunteer. Yet, in poll after poll, question after question, month after month, and across ideology, race, and age, more women than men are telling us “I don’t know.”
Since August, of the 98 questions we’ve polled that offered “I don’t know” as a response, women consistently selected it at higher rates.
If you spent any time on the internet in 2025, you probably came across someone asking some version of the question: “Are Republicans really happier than Democrats?”
Whether in mainstream media, academia, or on Substack, it seemed like everyone wanted to know why conservatives appeared to report better mental health than liberals.
One potential answer, hypothesized by Derek Thompson, is that this is more a function of how emotions are expressed, rather than a true imbalance in happiness. In essence, both sides experience similar levels of negative emotions, but conservatives are more likely to “externalize,” bonding with others over conspiracy theories and anger, while liberals are more likely to “internalize,” retreating into their own shells. That’s why a Tufts study Thompson discussed found that conservatives had a slightly worse mood than liberals did, despite having much better mental health.
That seemed like a plausible explanation. But it’s not foolproof. After all, older surveys measuring “happiness,” rather than “mood” or “mental health,” have also found conservatives with an advantage.
But ultimately, despite the level of discourse on the subject, there just isn’t a ton of polling that looks at this question in detail. So, of course, we decided to conduct our own.
Last week, we looked at whether men are really lonelier than women. This week, we’re breaking down the supposed happiness gap between conservatives and liberals.
Men are lonely. Maybe it’s because they are marrying later and working harder. Maybe it’s because “women are outpacing them in school and at work.” Maybe it’s because they don’t know how to text or because they don’t have old boys’ clubs anymore.
We’ve read all sorts of takes on mental health over the last several years, but few of them are substantiated by hard data. That’s why we at The Argument decided to conduct a study over the last few months centered around mental health.
Over the course of three national surveys of registered voters conducted between August and December, we asked 15 questions — five per survey — centered around loneliness, mental health, anxiety, and socialization. Each response was mapped to a numerical value between -1 and 1, with -1 indicating the most antisocial and 1 indicating the most social response.
With nearly 23,000 responses to survey questions distributed over more than 4,500 individual survey respondents, our dataset is rich and lends itself well to subgroup analysis.
Here’s what we found.
A few months ago, a 2021 Pew Research Center study on Americans and their reading habits caught my eye. In particular, this survey said something astounding about the number of Americans who read: Seventy-seven percent of Americans said they read a book (in whole or in part) over the preceding year in some shape or form.1
That number seemed a bit high to me, especially given the other evidence we have. A 2022 survey from the National Endowment for the Arts found that just 49% of adults reported reading a book in the last year. And sure, the literacy rate is probably higher for registered voters, who tend to be more educated than nonvoters, but does that mean the reading rate is 28 percentage points higher?
The Pew result didn’t align with other trends I was familiar with either. We know that literacy rates have been declining for a while now, and a study based on the American Time Use Survey data found that just 16% of adults read for pleasure on a daily basis — down from 28% in 2004.