Chana Etengoff, Ph.D., is a 2024-2025 PRRI Public Fellow and an associate professor of psychology at Adelphi University, where she teaches graduate courses in diversity, social justice, and intersectional psychology. Dr. Etengoff thanks Dr. Bernard Gorman for his contributions to data analysis.
The first 150 days of President Donald Trump’s second term have been marked by a number of executive orders impacting LGBTQ individuals. Many of these executive orders are positioned to be representative of Americans’ concerns about gender and sexual minority rights. While there may have been an increase in Republican voters at the 2024 election polls with these views, it is unclear whether the decline in support for LGBTQ rights is consistent across Americans of all age groups. As we look towards the future voting landscape in America, we need to consider that young American voters (18-29 years) have come of age in a country that has legalized same-sex marriage for the last decade, and this may outshine more recent sociopolitical shifts. In this vein, PRRI reports that Gen Zers (born 1997-2012) are significantly more likely to identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or something else (28%) compared with millennials (16%), Gen Xers (7%), baby boomers (4%), and the members of the Silent Generation (4%). In addition, young American voters between the ages of 18-29 are a distinctive group as they are emerging into adulthood and establishing their own political views that may differ from their parents. This Spotlight, therefore, examines whether LGBTQ rights support has remained favorable among 18-29 year-old, emerging adult voters over time.
Young Americans and Emerging Adulthood
Emerging adulthood is a developmental stage that often unfolds between the ages of 18-29, especially for those who live in industrialized countries that support higher education. This life stage is between adolescence and adulthood — and is characterized as a time of self-discovery, identity exploration/experimentation, individuation, and self-determination.[1] From this perspective, 18-29 year old voters are likely to explore identity politics from both personal (i.e., emerging adulthood) and sociopolitical (i.e., legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015) positions. Given this backdrop, there may be a gap between the current administration’s LGBTQ rights constraining policies and young Americans’ attitudes on LGBTQ rights.
Measuring LGBTQ Rights: An Overview
LGBTQ individuals’ rights have been politicized across a number of issues over the last decade, including same-sex marriage, legal protections to prevent LGBTQ discrimination, and LGB service refusal (allowing a business owner to refuse to provide products/service to LGB individuals, if doing so violates their religious beliefs). PRRI has tracked Americans’ attitudes regarding these LGBTQ rights with the PRRI American Values Atlas since 2015.[2]
Young Americans’ Attitudes on LGBTQ Rights Over Time: 2015-2024
Over the last decade, PRRI has found that 18-29 year olds’ support of same-sex marriage has been largely steady and favorable (see Figure 1). Opposition to same-sex marriage has remained a minority viewpoint among members of this age group, ranging from 16-27% between 2015-2024.[3] However, larger sociopolitical shifts do coincide with increases in opposition to same-sex marriage. For example, opposition to same-sex marriage peaked at the mid-point of President Trump’s first term in 2019 (25%) as well as during Trump’s 2024 campaign for his second term in office (27%).
Similarly, though 18-29 year olds’ views on preventing LGBTQ discrimination have vacillated between strong and moderate support over the years, their overall positive views on preventing LGBTQ discrimination have held the majority since 2015 (ranging from 79-83%).[4] However, opposition to LGBTQ protections peaked during the first Trump administration in 2018 at 20%, as well as at 22% in 2023 and 2024, around President Trump’s second term in office (see Figure 2).
A similar attitudinal pattern is reflected in 18-29 year olds’ support of preventing LGB service refusal on religious grounds (see Figure 3), with young Americans’ support declining in 2019 at the mid-point of Trump’s first term in office. In addition, rates of support for preventing religiously-based service refusals further declined from 69% at the conclusion of Trump’s first term in 2021 to 61% during Trump’s second presidential campaign in 2024.
Of the three LGBTQ rights issues studied by PRRI, religiously based service refusals to LGB individuals has steadily garnered the greatest level of opposition from the 18-29 year-old cohort as compared to opposition to nondiscrimination laws and same sex marriage (see Figure 4).[3] This suggests that young Americans may view the tension between LGBTQ rights and religious rights, when it comes to service refusals, as distinctive from other LGBTQ rights debates.
Based on this large-scale data collection from PRRI (at times, exceeding 30,000 participants), we see that the majority of young Americans continue to hold favorable LGBTQ rights attitudes despite sociopolitical shifts. These findings lend support to the argument that for many emerging adults, their support of LGBTQ rights is aligned with their own developmental values such as freedom of identity, exploration, and self-determination. However, minority opposition to LGBTQ rights has also increased during both of President Trump’s terms in office, with young Americans being more likely to oppose policies that would prevent religiously based service refusals than same-sex marriage or LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections. Young Americans’ higher levels of opposition to preventing religiously based LGBTQ service refusals suggest that this age group’s freedom of expression values are distributed across both LGBTQ rights and religious freedom claims.
[1] Arnett, J. J. (2007). Emerging adulthood: What is it, and what is it good for?. Child Development Perspectives, 1(2), 68-73.
[2]Respondents were asked to rate their levels of support on a 4-point scale, ranging from strongly favor (1) to strongly oppose (4).
[3] When combining “strongly oppose” and “oppose” categories
[4] When combining “strongly favor” and “favor” categories
