With six recent polls showing support for same-sex marriage at 59 percent, 56 percent, 55 percent, 55 percent, 54 percent, and 53 percent, it seems like a good time to make anothergraph of the polling data. The following figure shows the net support for marriage equality in 175 polls over the past 29 years—the percent in favor minus the percent against. I've labeled a handful of notable events for orientation. The line is a Loess regression model.
But first, this line will likely keep going up in the long term. Why? One, conservatives have spent millions and thrown everything they had against marriage equality; the result has been only temporary drops in support at worst. Two, and this cannot be repeated enough, because young people are far more supportive of marriage equality than the oldest cohort they are replacing. Support in the general population will continue to rise as long as this remains true (and I've seen no evidence to suggest it will change).
