Following President Trump’s electoral victory, conservatives reportedly feel optimistic about free speech in America, while the opposite is reportedly true for liberals. What do you think?

From The Christian Post. Conservatives have become much more optimistic about the state of free speech in the United States after President Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, while liberals have become more pessimistic, a new poll shows.

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A January 2025 National Speech Index, published Thursday by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, surveyed 1,000 Americans about their views on the state of free speech and the First Amendment in the U.S. Conducted from Jan. 3-9, the data has a margin of error of +/-3 percentage points.

“Unsurprisingly, the sudden shift suggests that for many [Americans,] their feelings about the future of free speech depend in large part on whether they trust whomever occupies the White House,” FIRE Research Fellow and Manager of Polling and Analytics Nathan Honeycutt said in a statement.

“Of course, we at FIRE have long recognized that no party has a monopoly on censorship.”

The fifth survey of its kind conducted on a quarterly basis since January 2024 shows that a majority of Americans who identify as conservative (52%) and slightly less than half of Americans who consider themselves very conservative (49%) believe that things are heading in the “RIGHT direction” when it comes to people being able to freely express their views. This constituted an all-time high in the survey’s history.

In January 2024, 20% of conservative Americans and 18% of very conservative Americans thought the state of free speech was heading in the “RIGHT direction.” Those numbers barely budged in April 2024, measured at 23% among conservatives and 19% among the very conservative.

While the share of conservatives confident about the state of free speech in the U.S. dropped to a record low of 16% in July 2024, the percentage of very conservative Americans who felt the same way increased slightly to 20%. In October 2024, 18% of conservative voters and 30% of very conservative voters expressed optimism about the state of free speech.

By contrast, only 34% of Americans who characterize themselves as “liberal” and 32% who believe they are “very liberal” felt positively about the state of free speech in January 2025, two months after Trump, a Republican, was elected to replace outgoing Democrat President Joe Biden.

This marked a sharp decline from 49% of liberals and 46% of very liberal Americans who expressed the same level of confidence in the state of free speech in the U.S. in October 2024.

In July 2024, the difference between the two groups was larger, with 45% of liberal Americans and about one-third (31%) of those who call themselves “very liberal” thinking free speech was heading in the “RIGHT direction.”

Three months earlier, a majority of liberal Americans (54%) thought free speech in the U.S. was on a positive trajectory as did 45% of the “very liberal.” During the first installment of the Free Speech Index in January 2024, 32% of liberals and 46% of “very liberal” Americans held the same view.

In addition to measuring Americans’ thoughts about the overall state of free speech, the survey asked respondents whether they viewed a series of statements as provocative or offensive.

The statement viewed as “very” or “extremely” offensive by the highest percentage of Americans (80%) was the belief that “America got what it deserved on 9/11,” referring to the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks that killed thousands of people.

Other declarations seen as “very” or “extremely” offensive by a majority of Americans include the assertions that “children should be able to transition without parental consent” (59%) and that “the police are just as racist as the Ku Klux Klan” (51%). Meanwhile, less than half of respondents thought the ideas that “Black Lives Matter is a hate group” (45%) and “the Catholic Church is a pedophilic institution” (42%) were “very” or “extremely” offensive.

Forty percent of Americans believed that saying trans-identified people have a “mental disorder” (40%) was “very” or “extremely” offensive while 39% had the same view about the belief that “abortion should be completely illegal.” Less than one-third of respondents (32%) considered the opinion that “illegal immigrants should be arrested and deported” was “very” or “extremely” offensive.

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This article was originally published at The Christian Post. Used with permission. Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America – Donald Trump, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66881681.