> polling struggles with this because it defines “how the world was 30 years ago” (e.g. the home that almost everyone I know grew up in) as being hard right / conservative

Blanket statements that frame the problem dishonestly are a large contribution to the division. I'm speaking from a USian perspective here, but the people calling themselves "conservative" these days are imagining rosy snapshots of the past in a range from 30 up to 80 years ago (depending on the specific issue), decidedly not what most people "grew up in". And they aren't even rallying behind constructive solutions that might undo or at least mitigate the problems we're currently facing, but are rather just pushing some vague idea that tearing down our societal institutions will automatically cause those problems to be fixed. That is really the polar opposite of conservatism, and we should stop calling it such. I'd say it's more like anger driven accelerationism.