A recent survey reveals that among the young voters who make up a significant portion of supporters for Argentina’s first right-wing president, Javier Milei, there is a notably higher number of men compared to women. This suggests an ideological distinction exists between young Argentine men and women.
Ernesto Calvo, Gabriel Kessler, María Victoria Murillo, Gabriel Vommaro / Americas Quarterly
Since Javier Milei’s election last November as Argentina’s first right-wing outsider president, many articles have been dedicated to his radical policy proposals and eccentric habits. But there’s been less attention to who his voters are, and what they believe.
One popular narrative holds that Milei’s supporters don’t necessarily agree with him ideologically—they’re simply angry over the country’s continued economic slide, disaffected by the political class and generally uninformed. But we reached a very different finding after fielding a national survey in December.
Our results show that Milei’s supporters are considerably more aligned with his preferences than has been previously recognized. The core voters of his newly created La Libertad Avanza party are not just discontented with the political establishment: They also have right-wing preferences on salient economic and social issues. What’s more, his first-round voters tend to be younger, and men outnumber women significantly. An ideological divide is emerging among young male and female Argentinians.
Anatomy of an electorate
Who are Milei’s voters? We fielded a representative survey of 2400 Argentine voters during the third week of December in order to find out.
In the first-round presidential election of October 23, Milei won 30% of the national vote, with strong showings outside of the metropolitan region of Buenos Aires. His support grew to 55.7% in the runoff election on November 19, collecting most votes from the center-right candidate Patricia Bullrich and from the non-Kirchnerist Peronist Juan Schiaretti. More than 80% of Bullrich voters shifted to Milei, along with about 40% of Schiaretti’s voters.
While the media often depicts Milei’s vote as anti-establishment, non-ideological and angered by the country’s dismal economic performance (inflation peaked at 211% in 2023) and increasing insecurity, we find voters who are more aligned with Milei’s ideology: conservative, with pro-market preferences. They’re opposed to the pace of cultural change on gender issues; they reject abortion legalization and gay marriage. They also think that taxes kill employment and welfare is only acceptable on a temporary basis.
We do not know how stable these preferences will be, but what’s clear is that the country is seeing the emergence of a right-wing electorate. Milei’s first round voters are the most right-wing, with values of 5.3 on a scale from 1-7, with the median voter at 4. What’s more, they are not very distant from voters who chose Bullrich (4.9 for female and 5.1 for males), which explains the ease of vote transfers between both rounds, given also that around 54% of voters in the first round had conservative attitudes. These voters are considerably to the right of supporters of Peronist candidate Sergio Massa, who received 37% of the vote in the first round, and the 3% who choose left-wing candidate Myriam Bregman.
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