The percentage of Americans who say they are satisfied with the acceptance of gay and lesbian people in the country has reached a new peak of 62%, according to a poll released Wednesday.
Gallup’s annual Mood of the Nation poll asks people about their satisfaction with aspects of U.S. life and policy areas, ranging from the overall quality of life to the nation’s military strength and environmental issues.
Americans’ satisfaction with the acceptance of gay and lesbian people stood out in the 2022 poll because it reached the highest level the nation has seen since Gallup started tracking the trend in 2001, though the peak is statistically similar to 2016 levels.
Poll respondents also reported a greater level of satisfaction with acceptance of gay and lesbian people than any of the 20 other issues Gallup tracked this year.
And while satisfaction on many of the other issues decreased this year, the numbers on gay and lesbian individuals grew substantially: In 2022, 62% of survey respondents said they were very or somewhat satisfied with the acceptance of gays and lesbians in the nation, up from 55% in 2021 and 56% in 2020.
Jeff Jones, a senior editor at Gallup, told USA TODAY that the question shows whether gay and lesbian people are “being considered not an outsider group but a normal, mainstream group of people in the U.S.”
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He said this data demonstrates a shift from a time “where the public was kind of opposed to treating them the same as everybody else to one where that’s definitely the norm.”
“It just speaks to changes in societal norms that we’ve seen over the past, really, two decades,” Jones said. “When we used to ask about same-sex marriage, in the 1990s and even in early 2000s, we would have majorities opposed. And now we have solid majorities that seem to grow at least a little bit every year.”
Fifty-nine percent of Democratic survey respondents said they were very or somewhat satisfied with the acceptance of gay and lesbian people, up from 48% in 2021. Among Republican survey respondents, 64% said they were satisfied, an increase from 62% in 2021.
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Outlook on energy, the economy drops
But as the coronavirus pandemic continues and the nation faces other challenges, Americans’ outlook on a range of issues has dipped.
Over the past year, satisfaction with energy policies in the U.S. saw the sharpest drop of the issues listed in the survey. Twenty-seven percent of respondents said they were somewhat or very satisfied with the nation’s energy policies, down from 42% in 2021 and 44% in 2020.
Jones blamed elevated gas prices for Americans’ bleak outlook on energy policies.
“It’s hard for people to escape gas prices when they go up,” Jones said. “Every time they fill the tank, they’re reminded of it. So when you turn around and a survey asks about energy prices, or energy in general, it’s kind of top of mind for them.”
Satisfaction with the state of the nation’s economy also saw a 10-point drop over the past year, from 43% to 33%. Gallup in a news release said inflation, which has hit decade-spanning highs in recent months, is likely driving the dip.
But despite survey respondents’ outlook on a slate of policy issues, 69% said they were satisfied with the overall quality of life in the country, which is up from 67% in 2021. However, the outlook is still down from 84% in 2020.
Disapproving of abortion policies
The survey also saw a drop in satisfaction with the country’s handling of abortion policies. Twenty-four percent said they were satisfied with the state of the “nation’s policies regarding the abortion issue,” compared with 33% in 2021 and 32% in 2020.
Gallup said in a release that the decline could be tied to restrictive abortion laws in Texas and Mississippi. The Texas law bans abortions after six weeks, among other measures. The Mississippi law bans most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Abortion rights are at a critical juncture in the U.S. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments recently on the constitutionality of Mississippi’s ban, and dozens of states are poised to ban abortion in some form if the court OKs the ban or overturns Roe v. Wade, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research and policy organization.
And the retirement of Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, who has written some of the court’s most important decisions on abortion, also puts a national spotlight on this issue.
Jones said “most of the drop” in the survey on abortion policies “is coming among Democrats.”
It’s “partially a response to what’s happened in the last few months on abortion, but maybe also looking ahead and seeing that there could be major changes in there that Democrats really don’t approve of,” Jones said.
The Gallup poll is based on telephone interviews conducted from Jan. 3-16. It includes a sample of 811 adults in the U.S. and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
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