A new Gallup poll shows support for LGBTQ+ people falling for the second consecutive year, with same-sex marriage approval down to 65% from a 2022 peak of 71%, and moral acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships at its lowest since 2016. The decline is driven almost entirely by Republicans, whose support for same-sex marriage has collapsed 18 points in five years. This is not a broad societal shift. It is the measurable result of a deliberate, well-funded campaign to reverse decades of progress.
What the numbers actually say
Before anyone uses these figures as evidence that public opinion has simply moved on, it is worth being precise about what the data shows. Democratic support for same-sex marriage sits at 87%, unchanged. Independent support has dipped only modestly. The collapse is Republican, and it is steep: from 55% supporting same-sex marriage in 2021 to 37% today, and from 56% finding gay and lesbian relationships morally acceptable to 35%. Nearly two-thirds of Republican voters now consider it immoral to be gay. For trans people the number is even starker: only 5% of Republicans believe it is morally acceptable to change one's gender.
Those numbers did not emerge from nowhere. They are the direct product of years of deliberate political messaging, sustained funding from organisations like the Alliance Defending Freedom, and a strategy that has always been explicit about its goals: start with trans people, then come for marriage equality, then come for everything else. The ADF has openly named the elimination of marriage equality as part of what it calls its "generational wins" strategy. Project 2025 mapped out the federal rollbacks in detail. What we are watching now is implementation.
There is no LGB without the T
I have heard the argument, from people who should know better, that separating trans issues from LGB issues might be tactically wise. Give ground on trans rights, the thinking goes, and perhaps the rest of the community will be left alone. The Gallup data demolishes that idea completely. Republican Rep. Andy Ogles posted this week that "homosexuality has no place in America." Legislators in at least ten states have introduced resolutions calling on the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell. Ken Paxton has suggested Texas might reintroduce sodomy laws. The Trump administration removed bisexual people from the Stonewall National Monument. It dismantled the LGBTQ+ youth option within the 988 crisis lifeline. It has effectively gutted PEPFAR, cutting people off from PrEP.
The campaign was never about trans people specifically. Trans people were the opening move because they were judged to be the most vulnerable, the least protected by established precedent, and the easiest to dehumanise in a short news cycle. It worked well enough that the strategy has now expanded. Anyone who thought throwing trans people to the wolves would buy safety for the rest of the community was wrong, and the data now makes that unmistakably clear.
A manufactured dip is not a mandate
What strikes me most about the way these poll results are being discussed in some quarters is the category error at the heart of it. A drop in approval ratings driven by one party's sustained propaganda campaign is being framed as evidence that Americans have reconsidered their values. They have not. The majority of Americans still support same-sex marriage. The majority still accept gay and lesbian relationships. Those numbers have not moved dramatically outside the Republican base. What has moved is the Republican Party's willingness to tell its voters that LGBTQ+ people are a threat, and the predictable effect that has on the views of people who trust that party.
Treating a manufactured culture-war dip as democratic permission to go further is not a reading of public opinion. It is a justification dressed up as one. And the people paying the price are not abstract polling categories. They are real people: young people losing access to crisis support lines, people in countries losing access to HIV medication because PEPFAR has been gutted, same-sex couples watching the legal foundation of their marriages be openly targeted by the attorney general of their state.
The community has always been in this together
Erin Reed's piece in Erin in the Morning puts it simply and correctly: there is no LGB without the T, and there never has been. The history of LGBTQ+ rights is a history of people showing up for each other precisely because they understood that no part of the community is safe while any part of it is under attack. The forces behind this campaign understood that too, which is why they designed the strategy the way they did.
The Gallup numbers are not a reason for despair. They are a description of where the fight currently stands, and they are honest about who is doing the fighting. Most Americans have not abandoned LGBTQ+ people. A political movement has worked hard to push one party's voters in a particular direction, and it has succeeded within that party. That is serious, and it deserves to be named for what it is. But the answer is solidarity, not retreat, and the data, read clearly, points that way too.