Polling, like anything else that involves human beings, is not strictly analytical. There is an emotional aspect to the results, a natural side effect of asking people how they feel about candidates or issues. That tendency is exaggerated in the current political moment (as the great Ariel Edwards-Levy has written), when partisanship runs high and polling offers Americans a non-Election-Day opportunity to express their enthusiasm or distaste for what’s unfolding in our country.

It is through that lens that we should consider new polling from Gallup indicating that 2 in 5 young women would like to permanently move out of the country. But we should not consider those numbers solely through that lens.

The Gallup finding is striking, if not sudden. The pollster has been asking a version of this question since 2008, finding that young people were consistently-but-only-slightly more likely to express interest in moving out of the U.S. than were older Americans and Americans overall. Since 2016, though — that is, since the year that Donald Trump first won election to the White House — the percentage of young women who’ve expressed that desire has surged.

It’s useful to remember that we’re not talking about one group of people who are changing their minds. A woman aged 18 to 44 in 2025 was not necessarily a woman in that age group in 2016, and vice versa. This shift likely reflects both an expressed decline in enthusiasm for the U.S. among women and an increase in the number of women who never would have expressed enthusiasm in the first place.