On the first of the year I ran new demographic stats about the break down of “likes” on Facebook. While I run stats on gender, age, and more, I don’t run all of the stats gathered. For over a year I’ve been gathering the political persuasion of these individuals as well. With it being a Presidential election year it felt right to start regularly covering the data along with the regular demographic data.

First, lets look at the general information for Facebook users in the United States. Since September 2014, Facebook has placed individuals into five silos, Conservative, Liberal, Moderate, Very Conservative, and Very Liberal.

On average the stats have measured the political affiliation for 175,982,456 users in the United States. There’s currently about 192 million users in the United States on Facebook.

A glitch prevented data gathering in May 2015, but you can see the percentage for each political persuasion is pretty consistent since I began recording data.

When it comes to percentage, those that consider themselves Liberal was about equal to those who are Moderate, while Very Liberal and Conservative were about equal. Very Conservative came in as the smallest group.

When we combine the Liberal and Very Liberal, and Conservative and Very Conservative, we get the total Liberal population just under half the total population, and it’s still fairly flat.

How does comic fandom compare to this?

Using the population data from the monthly reports, I’ve found comic fandom is more liberal than the average Facebook population with those considering themselves Liberal being the largest population and those considered Very Conservative the smallest group. We also see a bump of those being Liberal at the end of 2015/beginning of 2016 mostly at the cost of Moderates.

There’s clear space between Liberal and the second largest group Moderate. Also interesting is Very Liberal at times overtaking Conservatives as the two ideologies compete as to which is the larger population on average Conservative accounts for 15.55% while Very Liberal is 15.48%. Very Liberal is the majority at the beginning and end of the time frame.

Combining the similar ideologies we see some interesting stats. Unlike the general Facebook population which remains flat, we see some movement over time. Liberals at times make an outright majority at times and overall Moderates outnumber Conservatives.

We can see Liberals dip over 2015 with a sharp increase at the end of the year. While I can’t say definitively why this occurred you wonder if news coverage of the 2016 Presidential race had an impact.

No matter how you cut it, it’s clear those who like comics on Facebook are more liberal than the general Facebook population. Remember that the next time someone says comics are “too liberal.”

Stay tuned, as this data will be updated monthly along with the normal demographic data as we head in to November 2016.