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New polling from Gallup on the share of U.S. adults who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer helps put the Republican Party’s grim political prospects in focus.
Gallup found that the percentage of adults who identify as LGBTQ increased slightly from 7.1% in 2021 to 7.2% in 2022. That’s double the percentage of LGBTQ-identifying adults surveyed in 2012. And those percentages are significantly higher among young Americans.
As NBC News noted:
Continuing previous trends, Generation Z, or those ages 19 to 26, are the most likely to identify as LGBTQ, at 19.7%, compared to 11.2% of millennials, who are 27 to 42; 3.3% of Generation X, who are 43 to 58; 2.7% of baby boomers, who are 59 to 77; and 1.7% of the Silent Generation, who are 78 or older.
Gallup found that younger generations are much more likely to identify as bisexual than older generations. For example, 66% of LGBTQ people in Generation Z and 62% of LGBTQ millennials identify as bisexual, compared to 48% of Generation X, 26% of baby boomers and 35% of the Silent Generation.
The findings could very likely signal trouble ahead for Republicans, as they double, triple and quadruple down on their anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. A party full of members who obsess over trans people’s bodies, and banning classroom discussions about the experiences of LGBTQ people, and outing LGBTQ students, and probing children’s menstrual cycles, and demonizing drag shows for purported child abuse is likely going to face problems appealing to voters in a country where the share of people identifying as LGBTQ has dramatically increased in recent years. The GOP should be especially concerned about their prospects with younger generations, which the party has had trouble wooing for years, as percentages of LGBTQ-identifying adults among young people are much higher compared to their older counterparts.
The Republican Party is out of touch with many Americans, and this Gallup Poll is yet more evidence of this. Some in the GOP are taking a wartime posture — even calling for a “national divorce” — to whine about their party’s misalignment with large swaths of the United States.
But let’s not assume this means change is coming within the Republican Party. The oppressiveness and unpopularity of any particular policy has rarely deterred this bunch from pursuing it.