conflate liberal/conservative with the dominant left/right parties in these nations
does not include people who do not identify with one of those dominant parties
have some somewhat unreliable stats magic behind them
A lot of young men in the US are reporting themselves as "not a Democrat or Republican", and that's causing a lot of this proportional shift. I would bet that characterizes a lot of folks on this site who are not conservative.
At the same time I know many people (my brother included) that claim to be "independent" because they think that the trump camp is somehow outside the conservative camp, and therefore respond "independent" on polls. Because they think "I'm not democrat or conservative, I just want to drain the swamp" and then support trump, who is literally a swamp.
That's because when talking to tribalist types, you're seen as either with them or against them and in a system with 2 political parties "against them" means "supporting the other guys".
There is no independent thinking amongst the "party supporter" masses, only following and parroting of the party messages, so the idea of somebody being a genuinely independent thinker guided by personal principles rather than following some tribe or other is anathema to them.
On the flip side, in Europe extreme right parties are mostly being propped up by young men, while in other age groups men and women vote relatively similarly, which supports this finding.
conflate liberal/conservative with the dominant left/right parties in these nations
Why do so many people on Lemmy insist on pretending that liberal/conservative aren't relative terms?
Every single time those words get used with their little l/c to mean "relatively liberal/conservative) I see multiple people go "well ackshully a Liberal is a right wing ideology!"
The actual opposite of conservative in this case would be progressive. Liberal isn't a relative term, progressive is. It's easy enough to tell from context but when there's already no info on how these graphs came to be it just adds to them being questionable.
In the UK, where there actually is a centralist party, most of the "centralists" don't actually vote for them. Which really tells you everything you need to know about centralism. It's not a political ideology, it's just a refusal to engage.