There Is No Emerging LGBTQ Majority

T he future is gay, progressive, and Democratic. The astounding youth-led rise in the share of LGBTQ Americans over the past decade will produce an “equality electorate” oriented toward social justice. So argues a new report from Human Rights Campaign and Bowling Green State University drawing on U.S. Census Bureau survey data. According to the report, those who identify as LGBTQ composed 10 percent of the U.S. electorate in 2020, and this share will rise to 18 percent by 2040. This is mainly because younger people are vastly more likely to be gay than their elders, with 27 percent of Gen-Z identifying as something other than heterosexual. As this generation becomes the median voter, they will transform the United States into a more sexually diverse and progressive nation. You can almost hear echoes of predictions of the “emerging Democratic majority” that John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira prophesied in their 2002 book of the same name, which argued that a new electorate was coming into shape due in large part to the rise of the Latino population that would ensure perpetual Democratic dominance. That demographic change was real, and arguably played a role in flipping some states, notably California, even as Hispanics have recently drifted right. But the “rise of LGBTQ” narrative is built on much shakier demographic foundations.

Unfortunately for progressives, this pot of electoral gold at the end of the rainbow is probably a damp squib.

How so?

First, the unglamorous matter of survey methodology. The U.S. data don’t come from the census itself but from its Household Pulse survey, which it warns “may not meet some of the Census Bureau’s statistical quality standards.” I only bring this up because young people are notoriously tricky to sample, and Census Bureau Experimental Surveys such as this one use weighting assumptions to produce their estimates. By contrast, the Canadian census of 2021, based on complete data, showed that just 1.5 percent of couples were LGBTQ, and the share of LGBTQ adults was only 4 percent of the total. Are we really supposed to believe that the American numbers, in a more conservative, religious, and non-white country, are several times higher than Canada’s?

Surveys tend to overrepresent people who are high in the big-five personality trait of openness, which is associated with identifying as LGBTQ. Where we can properly compare survey and census data, as in Britain, there is a wide discrepancy between the two. YouGov’s Profiles U.K. panel of around 5,500 survey respondents shows that around a quarter of 18- to 20-year-olds identified as other than heterosexual in 2021. A large census sample of young people, however, placed the share at 7.6 percent in 2019, only a third as high as on other surveys.

A second major problem with the report concerns the link between LGBTQ identity and actual same-sex behavior. It has long been understood, at least since the advent of the Kinsey Scale in 1948, that many people may experience occasional same-sex attraction, especially women. If the rise in LGBTQ identity largely involves those experiencing incidental attraction labeling themselves homosexual, this has a very different implication from a situation in which more people exhibit sustained same-sex attraction and behavior. As I wrote earlier this year in my report for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI), data from the General Social Survey (GSS) on actual sexual partners show a growing divergence between same-sex identity and behavior. This is driven by the largest growth category: bisexual females with conventional sexual lifestyles. Indeed, the share of bisexual women who report only having had male sexual partners over the past five years rose from 13 percent in 2008–10 to 55 percent in 2018–21.

The third problem concerns the connection between sexual orientation and political beliefs. The Human Rights Campaign report assumes LGBTQ identity causes people to support progressivism and the Democrats. Ergo, as the former group grows, more liberal Democrats will emerge. However, while homosexual individuals have always leaned liberal and Democratic, it’s also plausible that liberal individuals with occasional same-sex thoughts are more inclined to defy convention and identify as LGBTQ than conservatives who experience the same mind-states. The GSS data, for instance, show that conservatives who have had same-sex partners are much less likely to identify as LGBTQ than liberals with the same sexual history.

LGBTQ is not simply an innate orientation, but is both a political and cultural identity. In fact, several major surveys show that “very liberal” Americans under 30 are around twice as likely to identify as non-heterosexual than “slightly liberal” Americans. Data on American undergraduates from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), additionally show that seven in ten very liberal white female students who support shouting down controversial speakers identify as gay.

This is not about LGBTQ people opting to be liberal Democrats instead of Republicans (“very” and “slightly” liberal individuals tend to vote the same way), but arguably reflects deeper psychological traits such as high openness, which predicts both LGBTQ identity and “very liberal” self-identification. Evidence for this comes from the GSS, which finds that much of the rise in young LGBTQ identity over the past decade has taken place among the most-liberal fifth of young people. This “very liberal” group has shifted from 85–90 percent heterosexual identification in 2016 to just 66 percent heterosexual by 2021. Whatever radical identity change is occurring is heavily siloed among the very liberal, limiting its potential to change people’s politics.

What this adds up to is that the big increase in LGBTQ identity among young people leaves the proportion of liberals and conservatives largely unaffected, which is why partisanship among young people hasn’t changed much despite the LGBTQ revolution. All of which blunts the progressive impact of the LGBTQ surge.

Finally, there is the obvious retort that many, if not most, young LGBTQ people are likely to be otherwise in 20 years. Lacking repeated-measures data on people’s sexual orientation over time, we have no way of knowing what the future holds. But, contrary to the report’s claim that people come out more as they age, in our tolerant society, the more likely life-cycle dynamic is for intermittently same-sex-attracted people with conventional sexual behavior to pair up with someone of the opposite sex, settle down, and accept the fact that they’re pretty much the same as everyone else.