Support for same-sex marriage in the U.S. has fallen to 65%, down six percentage points from the record high of 71% set in 2022 and 2023, according to Gallup’s latest polling. It’s the first sustained multi-year decline the tracking poll has recorded since Gallup began asking Americans the question three decades ago.
The number had already slipped to 69% in 2024. This year’s 65% confirms that dip wasn’t a one-time blip: support has now declined for multiple years in a row, breaking a trend that ran almost uninterrupted from 1996, when just 27% of Americans favored legalizing same-sex marriage, through the 2022–2023 peak.
The Shift Is Almost Entirely One Party
Gallup’s data traces nearly all of the movement to a single group: Republicans. GOP support for same-sex marriage has fallen to 37%, down from 55% in 2021–2022 — an 18-point drop in four years. That decline pushes Republican attitudes back to roughly where they stood between 2005 and 2014, effectively erasing more than a decade of gradually shifting views within the party.
Democratic support, by contrast, has held essentially flat at 87% since 2022. Independents sit at 67%, down six points over the same window — a smaller but still real slide.
The result is a partisan gap wider than it’s been in years. Where Republicans and Democrats were once inching toward consensus on the issue, they’re pulling apart again, and Gallup notes that most of the recent movement in attitudes toward LGBTQ+ issues broadly has occurred specifically among Republicans rather than the population at large.
Part of a Broader Cooling
The marriage question is only one data point in the same Gallup release, titled “U.S. Support for LGBTQ+ Issues Remains Down From Peak.” That framing signals the decline isn’t isolated to marriage alone — favorability toward LGBTQ+ rights broadly has cooled since its high point earlier in the decade, across the range of questions Gallup has tracked annually for years.
Context: A Decade After Obergefell
The Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, at a time when public support was already climbing quickly. For years afterward, Gallup’s annual tracking showed support rising almost every cycle, making it one of the more reliably one-directional trends in American social-issue polling.
That streak is now broken. A majority of the country, 65%, still supports same-sex marriage — nowhere close to the near-even split of the 1990s and 2000s. But the direction of travel has changed, and Gallup’s numbers suggest that change is being driven by a specific, identifiable shift inside one political coalition rather than a broad national reconsideration.
