Support for marriage equality went up among Democrats to the highest level it has ever been in a newly released Gallup Poll, while support for marriage equality among Republicans dropped for the third year in a row, creating the largest recorded gap between the parties on the topic.
The Gallup poll asked people whether same-sex couples should be legally allowed to get married. Approximately 88% of Democrats said yes, up from 83% in 2024. But only 41% of Republicans said yes, down from a high of 55% in 2022. This puts the gap between Republicans and Democrats at 47%, the highest it has ever been for that poll question, which Gallup has been asking since 1996.
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Overall, 68% of American adults support marriage rights for same-sex couples, regardless of political party affiliation. This percentage has remained relatively stable since 2020, as Republicans and Democrats have drifted in opposite directions on the matter.
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The current president, who is the leader of the Republican Party, has never publicly supported marriage equality.
“I just don’t feel good about it,” he said in 2011. “You know, for New York, it’s like, how can you be against gay marriage? But I’m opposed to gay marriage.”
“I’m just for traditional marriage,” he repeated in 2015. After the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage rights in its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, the most the president would say about the matter is that it’s “settled” and “done.”
Republicans are also more likely to say that same-sex relationships are morally wrong than they have been in recent years. Only 38% of Republicans said that “gay or lesbian relations” are “morally acceptable,” down from a high point of 56% in 2022. Meanwhile, 86% of Democrats said that same-sex relations are morally acceptable, the highest result ever.
Across various demographics, support for the moral acceptability of same-sex relationships and support for marriage equality closely tracked each other. Women were more likely to support both than men. People who attend church services less frequently were more supportive than those who attend more often. People with a college education were more likely to be supportive than those without a college education.
This supports the idea that support for marriage rights is just a proxy for acceptance of queer people in general. While that may seem like an obvious connection today, 15 years ago, during the fight for marriage, centrists and conservatives would often argue that one could be supportive of gay people without supporting marriage rights.
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