Democrat Politics

Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayoral candidate and state assemblyman, laughed off an attack from President Donald Trump on Wednesday, following his preemptive primary win on Tuesday night. 

Mamdani also took a swipe at Trump’s failure to deliver on his campaign promises of lowering costs for millions of Americans.

“It’s finally happened, the Democrats have crossed the line. Zohran Mamdani, a 100% Communist Lunatic, has just won the Dem Primary, and is on his way to becoming Mayor,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump also complained that Mamdani had received support from New York Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“This is not the first time that President Trump is going to comment on myself,” Mamdani said when asked by ABC News about Trump’s outburst.

He added, “He ran a presidential campaign in part speaking about the necessity of making groceries cheaper and to make the cost of living more navigable for so many. He’s shown himself uninterested and unable to deliver on that.”

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Mamdani also explained to ABC that he intends to continue fighting against Trump’s weaponization of the federal government to attack his political opponents and his policies that target people based on their gender identity or immigration status.

In a separate interview with MSNBC, Mamdani was asked to address the bigoted attacks that have been lobbed in his direction from Republicans and conservative pundits—including media outlets like Fox News and the New York Post, both owned by right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch.

Andrew Cuomo lost to Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary on June 24.

For instance, Trump confidante and right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer claimed that Mamdani is “supported by terrorists” and that “NYC is about to see 9/11 2.0.” 

And Fox News host Greg Gutfeld previously said that Mamdani was a “social justice suicide bomber.”

“I’ve spoken to many Muslims across this city who have shared that their fear of having to be essentially branded a terrorist just by living in public life is one that keeps them preferring life in the shadows, life outside of that specter,” Mamdani told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki. “And this is not the way that we can have our city be. It’s not the way that we can have our country be.”

Mamdani’s upset of Andrew Cuomo, who had the support of establishment Democrats and some Republicans, shocked the entire country. His progressive campaign has the momentum that has made him a target for all of conservatism, from Trump on down.

But Mamdani is making it clear that he isn’t backing down from the challenge any time soon.

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In an unprecedented and dangerous move, the Department of Justice has sued all 15 federal judges in Maryland—a sweeping retaliation against a court order that temporarily halts deportations. 

At the center of the legal firestorm is a May 21 order from Chief Judge George L. Russell III, which bans federal officials from deporting immigrants who file habeas corpus petitions in Maryland until at least 4 PM on the second business day after filing. 

The goal, Russell wrote, is to prevent rushed removals that deny immigrants a fair hearing, especially after business hours or on weekends, when proper review becomes logistically impossible.

“The recent influx of habeas petitions concerning alien detainees … filed after normal court hours and on weekends and holidays has created scheduling difficulties and resulted in hurried and frustrating hearings,” the order reads.

Russell cited the All Writs Act and a 1966 Supreme Court precedent that gives courts limited power to preserve jurisdiction while they review urgent matters.

But the Trump administration isn’t backing down. In a broad legal challenge, the DOJ argues that Russell’s standing order illegally grants blanket relief to all immigrants without considering individual cases and unlawfully restricts the president’s authority to enforce immigration laws. 

A cartoon by Clay Bennett.

“A sense of frustration and a desire for greater convenience do not give Defendants license to flout the law. Nor does their status within the judicial branch,” DOJ attorneys wrote.

The DOJ is asking the 4th Circuit Court to assign a judge from outside the Maryland district to hear the case, claiming that all 15 judges have an inherent conflict of interest since they are all named as defendants.

Legal analysts say this move is without recent precedent.

“It’s extraordinary. And it’s escalating DOJ’s effort to challenge federal judges,” Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola, told The Associated Press.

Speaking to The Washington Post, J. Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge, was more blunt. 

“It is reckless and irresponsible and yet another direct frontal assault on the federal courts of this country,” he said.

The legal action appears to be the latest and most extreme salvo in the Trump administration’s ongoing war with the judiciary over immigration. And it didn’t take long for Democrats to sound the alarm. 

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore called the suit an “unprecedented effort to intimidate judges and usurp the power of the courts” and accused the Trump administration of “turning our Constitution on its head.”

Luttig says the administration helped create the chaos initially by rushing to deport immigrants en masse without proper notice or hearings. The Supreme Court recently ruled that one such group had a right to challenge their removal before being deported.

But that hasn’t stopped Trump officials, who have continued to lash out at judges who rule against them and openly question the courts’ authority to intervene.

Attorney General Pam Bondi clarified the Trump administration’s position in a statement on Wednesday.

“President Trump’s executive authority has been undermined since the first hours of his presidency by an endless barrage of injunctions designed to halt his agenda. This pattern of judicial overreach undermines the democratic process and cannot be allowed to stand,” she wrote.

President Donald Trump has criticized adverse rulings before—at one point calling for the impeachment of a federal judge who ordered for deported immigrants to be returned to the United States. While impeachment is unlikely and would require Senate conviction, it was enough to prompt a rare public rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

“Impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” he warned.

The Maryland bench, especially, has been a thorn in Trump’s side. Judges like Paula Xinis have forced the administration to reverse wrongful deportations. Others, like James K. Bredar, are overseeing lawsuits filed by Democratic state attorneys general who are challenging mass firings of federal employees. 

And in a year marked by sweeping executive actions, Maryland judges have blocked key Trump policies related to immigration, transgender health care, and civil service rights. Of the 15 judges in the district, 13 were appointed by Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. 

But legal scholars warn that the lawsuit could break long-standing norms between the executive and judicial branches. 

“The president and his attorney general will continue their ruthless attack on the federal Judiciary and the Rule of Law until the Supreme Court of the United States at least attempts to stop them,” Luttig warned. “Until now, the Supreme Court has acquiesced in the president’s war, while the devastating toll on the Federal Courts and the Rule of Law has mounted by the day.”

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In a decision that was expected but is no less appalling, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority just gave the green light for states to defund Planned Parenthood. But the majority decision in Medina v. Planned Parenthood is so much worse than that.

This case has generally been discussed in its factual context, which is whether South Carolina could bar Planned Parenthood from receiving federal Medicaid funds. The legal context, though, is broader. After South Carolina cut off Planned Parenthood funding, a patient, Julie Edwards, sued the state under U.S. code section 1983, which allows private parties to sue the government when it violates their rights. Edwards argued that Medicaid’s “any-qualified-provider” provision confers the right for Medicaid patients to use their physician of choice, and depriving Planned Parenthood of Medicaid funding violated that right. 

The court’s conservatives were always going to find a way to make it perfectly fine for states to withhold Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood, particularly given that they are all in on helping Trump, who has called for the complete defunding of the organization. They get to that conclusion in a sweeping, terrible way. 

The majority held that section 1983 does not give anyone the right to sue to enforce the Medicaid-related provision that says “any individual eligible for medical assistance (including drugs) may obtain such assistance from any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform the service or services required.” 

You, a normal person, might say, That certainly sounds like Medicaid patients have a right to choose their provider. 

The Supreme Court building, shown in April 2024

But the conservatives on the Supreme Court would respond, You fool, you rube. This isn’t a right. It’s more of a benefit, because we don’t really think that Congress meant for you to be able to personally sue to enforce it, even though they explicitly said you must be able to choose your care, for … reasons. 

So we’ve got a bad factual decision and a bad procedural decision. But wait, that’s not all! 

The holding isn’t limited to Planned Parenthood. Rather, the holding is that individual Medicaid recipients or clinics that receive Medicaid can’t sue to enforce the law’s “any-qualified-provider” requirement.

As bad as all of this is, it wasn’t enough for Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote a concurrence complaining that people just have too darn many rights they can use section 1983 to enforce. Thomas wants the rights that people can sue to enforce to be limited to how the term was understood when the Civil Rights Act of 1871, the predecessor to section 1983, was passed. This is Thomas’s go-to argument to restrict civil rights, a surface-level trip through history to bolster his bad arguments. 

In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did some actual factual history, pointing out that the Civil Rights Act of 1871 was “an exercise in grand ambition” in the wake of the Civil War, as white Southerners, aided by state and local officials, terrorized newly freed Black people. The act was necessary because the Reconstruction amendments had not adequately stopped state violence, and one remedy was to allow private citizens to sue to secure their rights. 

Jackson’s dissent notes that this isn’t the first time the court weakened this civil rights protection. They did it in multiple cases during the Reconstruction era, and the court was not covering itself in glory back then. In 1872, the court upheld a Kentucky statute that barred Black people from testifying against white defendants. In 1883, the court ruled that the 13th and 14th amendments could not serve as the basis for Congress to enact a law prohibiting private parties from discriminating against Black people. 

There’s a straight line from those cases to this court’s ceaseless chipping away at civil rights, particularly reproductive health. And these modern cases are no less shameful than the court’s openly racist rulings following the Civil War. The conservatives on the Supreme Court should be ashamed of themselves, but they’re incapable of such a thing.

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While completing a master’s degree in data analysis, Palwasha Zahid moved from Dallas to a town near Silicon Valley. The location made it easy to visit the campuses of tech stalwarts such as Google, Apple, and Nvidia.

Zahid, 25, completed her studies in December, but so far she hasn’t found a job in the industry that surrounds her.

“It stings a little bit,” she said. “I never imagined it would be this difficult just to get a foot in the door.”

Young people graduating from college this spring and summer are facing one of the toughest job markets in more than a decade. The unemployment rate for degree holders ages 22 to 27 has reached its highest level in a dozen years, excluding the coronavirus pandemic. Joblessness among that group is now higher than the overall unemployment rate, and the gap is larger than it has been in more than three decades.

Related | July Fourth celebrations are fizzling thanks to Trump’s economy

The rise in unemployment has worried many economists as well as officials at the Federal Reserve because it could be an early sign of trouble for the economy. It suggests businesses are holding off on hiring new workers because of rampant uncertainty stemming from the Trump administration’s tariff increases, which could slow growth.

“Young people are bearing the brunt of a lot of economic uncertainty,” Brad Hersbein, senior economist at the Upjohn Institute, a labor-focused think tank, said. “The people that you often are most hesitant in hiring when economic conditions are uncertain are entry-level positions.”

The growth of artifical intelligence may be playing an additional role by eating away at positions for beginners in white-collar professions such as information technology, finance, and law.

Higher unemployment for younger graduates has also renewed concerns about the value of a college degree. More workers than ever have a four-year degree, which makes it less of a distinguishing factor in job applications. Murat Tasci, an economist at JPMorgan, calculates that 45% of workers have a four-year degree, up from 26% in 1992.

While the difficulty of finding work has demoralized young people like Zahid, most economists argue that holding a college degree still offers clear lifetime benefits. Graduates earn higher pay and experience much less unemployment over their lifetimes.

The overall U.S. unemployment rate is a still-low 4.2%, and the government’s monthly jobs reports show the economy is generating modest job gains. But the additional jobs are concentrated in health care, government, and restaurants and hotels. Job gains in professions with more college grads, such as information technology, legal services, and accounting have languished in the past 12 months.

The unemployment rate has stayed low mostly because layoffs are still relatively rare. The actual hiring rate — new hires as a percentage of all jobs — has fallen to 2014 levels, when the unemployment rate was much higher, at 6.2%. Economists call it a no-hire, no-fire economy.

Related | Are Trump’s tariffs finally starting to rock the job market?

For college graduates 22 to 27 years old, the unemployment rate was 5.8% in March — the highest, excluding the pandemic, since 2012, and far above the nationwide rate.

Lexie Lindo, 23, saw how reluctant companies were to hire while applying for more than 100 jobs last summer and fall after graduating from Clark Atlanta University with a business degree and 3.8 GPA. She had several summer internships in fields such as logistics and real estate while getting her degree, but no offer came.

“Nobody was taking interviews or responding back to any applications that I filled out,” Lindo, who is from Auburn, Georgia, said. “My resume is full, there’s no gaps or anything. Every summer I’m doing something. It’s just, ‘OK, so what else are you looking for?’”

She has returned to Clark for a master’s program in supply chain studies and has an internship this summer at a Fortune 500 company in Austin, Texas. She’s hopeful it will lead to a job next year.

Artificial intelligence could be a culprit, particularly in IT. Matthew Martin, senior U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, has calculated that employment for college graduates 28 and above in computer science and mathematical occupations has increased a slight 0.8% since 2022. For those ages 22 to 27, it has fallen 8%, according to Martin.

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Company announcements have further fueled concerns. Tobi Lutke, CEO of online commerce software company Shopify, said in an April memo that before requesting new hires, “teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.”

Last week, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said AI would likely reduce the company’s corporate work force over the next few years.

“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy said in a message to employees. “We expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”

Zahid worries that AI is hurting her chances. She remembers seeing big billboard ads for AI at the San Francisco airport that asked, “Why hire a human when you could use AI?”

Still, many economists argue that blaming AI is premature. Most companies are in the early stages of adopting the technology.

Professional networking platform LinkedIn categorized occupations based on their exposure to AI and did not see big hiring differences between professions where AI was more prevalent and where it wasn’t, said Kory Kantenga, the firm’s head of economics for the Americas.

“We don’t see any broad-based evidence that AI is having a disproportionate impact in the labor market or even a disproportionate impact on younger workers versus older workers,” Kantenga said.

He added that the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes have also slowed hiring in tech. Many IT firms expanded when the Fed pinned its short-term rate at nearly zero after the pandemic. In 2022, the Fed began cranking up rates to combat inflation, which made it harder to borrow and grow.

In fact, IT’s hiring spree when rates were low — fueled by millions of Americans ramping up their online shopping and video conferencing — left many firms with too many workers, economists say.

Related | Consumer spending drops thanks to TACO Trump and his economic chaos

Cory Stahle, an economist at the job-listings website Indeed, says postings for software development jobs, for example, have fallen 40% compared with four years ago. It’s a sharp shift for students who began studying computer science when hiring was near its peak.

Zahid, who lives in Dublin, California, has experienced this whiplash firsthand. When she entered college in 2019, her father, who is a network engineer, encouraged her to study IT and said it would be easy for her to get a job in the field.

She initially studied psychology but decided she wanted something more hands-on and gravitated to data analysis. Her husband, 33, has a software development job, and friends of hers in IT received immediate job offers upon graduation a few years ago. Such rapid hiring seems to have disappeared now, she said.

She has her college diploma, but hasn’t hung it up yet.

“I will put it up when I actually get a job, confirming that it was worth it all,” she said.

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Related | Serial liar Trump tries to oversell his Iran strikes

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At a Pentagon press conference on Thursday morning, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth desperately tried to hide behind the competence and skill of the American military as he attempted to spin negative news about President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iran.

The Trump administration has been under fire after a leaked early assessment of the attack from the Pentagon indicated that the setback to Iran’s nuclear program was not as severe as Trump’s repeated claim that the program was completely obliterated.

Hegseth fumed at the press for reporting useful information to the public.

“Because you cheer against Trump so hard, it’s in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump, because you want him not to be successful so bad, you have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes,” Hegseth said to the press

Hegseth complained that “half-truths” were being released and “spun” to damage Trump, and claimed that doing so insulted the military members who executed the missions in Iran.

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At another point in the press conference, Hegseth even complained about Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin’s coverage of the attack, describing her as “about the worst” on the issue and “the one who misrepresents the most intentionally.” Hegseth, who formerly worked at Fox News, was once Griffin’s coworker.

The characterization is even stranger following reports that Fox News appears to have been a major motivator behind Trump’s decision to attack Iran.

Hegseth also echoed Trump’s recent complaints on the same topic. The president called the press “scum” for reporting on the shortcomings of the strikes in Iran.

Adding fuel to the fire, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei released a video on Thursday and claimed that the strikes had not been as effective as Trump said. There have not been independent assessments to validate either leader’s claims, and both regimes have significant credibility problems.

This satellite picture by Planet Labs PBC shows Iran’s underground nuclear enrichment site at Fordo following U.S. airstrikes targeting the facility, on June 22.

Trump and Hegseth have spent their careers as public figures repeating lie after lie. For instance, Trump clings to the falsehood that he won the 2020 election despite clear evidence that he lost both the popular vote and Electoral College to former President Joe Biden. Trump also infamously promoted the racist and false “birther” conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.

Hegseth’s invocation of military honor while spinning the bombing run is especially ironic since he himself compromised national security early in his tenure as defense secretary. Hegseth published the details of an upcoming military operation in a Signal group chat that inadvertently included a journalist, causing domestic and international embarrassment for the administration and the Pentagon.

When Hegseth isn’t bumbling through basic aspects of his job, he has pushed bigotry at the Department of Defense and reportedly spent government resources to make himself look better when appearing on Fox News.

The new spin attempt comes on the same day NBC News released a poll showing that a plurality of Americans (45%) oppose the U.S. military strikes on Iran, with only 38% supporting them and 18% not choosing either side. The poll echoes surveys taken in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, and polls taken before the attacks showed opposition to U.S. military intervention.

Americans largely don’t want this, and the early signs are that the strike didn’t deliver what Trump said it had. That is why Hegseth is spinning so hard and getting so upset in the process.

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If you have been curious about what the “viewpoint neutrality” celebrated by conservatives looks like in practice, look no further than the University of Florida Law School. That’s where one of Donald Trump’s first-term judicial appointees, U.S. District Judge John Badalamenti, rewarded an openly white nationalist and antisemitic student for writing an openly white nationalist paper arguing that the Constitution only applies to white people. 

This all went down last fall when Badalamenti taught a course on originalism, or the belief that the Constitution should be interpreted based on the Founding Fathers’ “original”meaning. For his capstone paper, Preston Damsky wrote a racist screed, which you can read here if you feel up to it. This thing is not subtle, but Badalamenti still gave Damsky the “book award” when the semester ended, effectively naming him the best student in the class.

Damsky says that the Founding Fathers “unambiguously conceived of the United States as a white country.” He calls for banning all nonwhite people from immigrating to the United States, but shows what he thinks is great magnanimity by assuring us that “non-whites would still be able to visit the U.S., without becoming residents, because tourism is not immigration.” He thinks birthright citizenship should not apply to the children of noncitizens, and he believes there is an invasion at the border—and the military should be able to kill border crossers. Oh, and also, we should get rid of the 14th and 15th Amendments, just for good measure.

Here’s a taste of Damsky’s scintillating argument:

However, given that the United States was founded as a race-based nation state for the preservation and betterment of White Americans (the People), as clearly laid out in the Preamble and revealed by our history, it is difficult to see how these amendments (or at least the way they have been interpreted in the post-World War II era) do not amount to unconstitutional, revolutionary usurpations by the constituted government power.

Now, high-profile originalists know better than to be this openly racist. But if you review Damsky’s policy positions, they aren’t really all that far afield from the rhetoric being spewed by conservative judges and Trump minions. 

As Madiba Dennie noted at Balls and Strikes, Trump appointee Judge James Ho thinks immigrants are an invasion and that we should rethink birthright citizenship. Not long before ascending to the bench, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the 14th Amendment was “possibly illegitimate.” And of course, Damsky’s rhetoric about immigrants and invasions and militarizing the border matches the hateful screeds coming out of the Trump administration right now. 

Perhaps that’s why Badalamenti wasn’t troubled by the paper. If you’re already fully immersed in the ongoing conservative project to roll back rights for everyone but white people, maybe this doesn’t even register. Multiple first-term Trump appointees, for example, refused to say that Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation case, was rightly decided. 

After The New York Times broke the story about Damsky, the interim dean of the law school issued a statement that trotted out the standard conservative tropes about how upholding academic freedom and the First Amendment means protecting every student’s right to spew white nationalist drivel. Sure, maybe—but that doesn’t mean a sitting federal judge should reward it as the best paper ever. The statement also takes pains to explain that Badalamenti didn’t know Damsky was an open white nationalist and just graded the paper on its merits, and also, of course, these are not Badalamenti’s views. 

It’s inconceivable that the very best paper in the class was one that literally calls for the Supreme Court to just dispose of the Reconstruction Amendments. That’s not astute reasoning or a complex legal concept; it’s just a racist popping off about how he wishes Black people never attained rights. 

But the kudos Damsky received along with a “neutral” defense from the law school’s interim dean apparently emboldened him enough to open an account on the social media platform X and start posting overtly racist and antisemitic statements, alarming the students around him.

Tucked in at the end of the dean’s latest statement is also this little tidbit: 

We have protected academic freedom and the student’s First Amendment rights while also prioritizing the safety and security of our community. As soon as the student’s conduct became threatening and substantially disruptive, in collaboration with UFPD and UF administration, the student was barred from campus. We heightened security across the college. It is important to note that the escalation in the student’s conduct that led to his trespass happened three months after the book award had been announced in January.

So a white nationalist and open antisemite was allowed to be so aggressive that he was eventually barred from campus, but not before he made plenty of antisemitic posts on social media, including saying that Jewish people were the “common enemy of humanity.”

Surely the Trump administration will be all over this, threatening to pull funding from Florida as it has tried with Ivy League universities Harvard and Columbia, right?

Related | Harvard pushed back—now Trump’s ramping up his war on higher education

In case you’re wondering what type of speech the University of Florida law school does find problematic and worthy of censorship, look no further than Carliss Chatman, a visiting professor. Chatman proposed a class called “Race, Entrepreneurship, and Inequality,” which the school arbitrarily renamed as just “Entrepreneurship.” 

Damsky and the law school want this to be a debate about free speech and the First Amendment, but no one is saying Damsky should be punished for the paper itself. Rather, people are pointing out that it is disturbing that a federal judge found this warping of originalism, one that demands allegiance to white supremacy and contends the courts should ignore the Constitution, to be the best paper in the class. 

Conservatives can tell themselves that Badalamenti was simply rewarding Damsky for the rigor of his analysis, but we all know better.

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Now that the Supreme Court has signed off on the Trump administration deporting immigrants to countries that they’re not even from, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has resumed her beloved prison photo shoots. 

The serial cosplayer has been in Central America the past few days, slapping on aviator sunglasses and posing as a member of the U.S. Coast Guard to celebrate shipping off more undocumented immigrants. On Tuesday, she was photographed on a naval ship in Panama looking down at a set of guns. 

But before playing military dress up, Noem stopped to visit Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino and even enjoyed the relaxing view of a deportation flight.

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“Today in Panama I met with President [Mulino] and Panamanian ministers to discuss our continued collaboration on illegal immigration,” she wrote on X Tuesday. “Panama has been a key regional ally — contributing to the dramatic decrease in illegal immigration through the Darien Gap, participating in the Repatriation Assistance Program, and serving as a model for the Biometric Data Sharing Partnership.”

On Wednesday, Noem made her way to Costa Rica where she toured a detention facility, pushing the agenda of tracking undocumented immigrations with biometric data—facial or voice recognition, fingerprints, and other information unique to an individual that’s stored in a large database. 

Homeland Security Secretary is seen cosplaying as a firefighter in March.

And while Noem fosters a relationship with Costa Rica, the nation’s courts are calling out the United States for human rights violations. 

After the United States shipped undocumented immigrants—including 80 children—from Iran, Afghanistan, China, and other countries to Costa Rica, many of them overstayed the maximum time that they were legally allowed to be held. 

According to The Tico Times, a court has ordered the release of the 200 immigrants. And while some of them opted for voluntary repatriation back to their home countries, others—like one woman from Afghanistan—fear death should they return home.

“The Taliban will kill me,” she said in a statement obtained by The Tico Times.

Noem is also planning to visit Guatemala and Honduras, where plenty of immigrants are being held in prisons or detention centers far away from their homes. 

Anything for a photo op. Right, ICE Barbie?

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For years, it looked as though the United States was steadily climbing toward a consensus on same-sex marriage. But 10 years after the Supreme Court ruled that there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, the split between Republicans and Democrats on the issue is wider than it’s been in decades.

Recent polling from Gallup shows that Americans’ support for same-sex marriage is higher than it was in 2015. Gallup’s latest data, however, finds a 47-percentage-point gap on the issue between Republicans and Democrats, the largest since it first began tracking this measure 29 years ago.

The size of that chasm is partially due to a substantial dip in support among Republicans since 2023.

An Associated Press polling analysis shows how same-sex marriage shifted from a clear minority position to a stance with broad support — and what the future could hold for views on the issue.

Same-sex marriage was once highly unpopular

Less than 40 years ago, same-sex marriage was a deeply unpopular issue.

In 1988, The General Social Survey showed that just about 1 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly agreed” or “agreed” with a statement that gay couples should have the right to marry. At that point, roughly 7 in 10 Americans — including similar shares of Democrats and Republicans — disagreed with the statement.

But as early as the 1990s, the politics of same-sex marriage were shifting. Gallup data from 1996 — the year the Defense of Marriage Act defined marriage as between one man and one woman — showed that 27% of U.S. adults said marriages between same-sex partners “should be recognized by the law as valid.” But Democrats and Republicans weren’t in lockstep anymore: Democrats were nearly twice as likely as Republicans to support legal recognition of same-sex marriages.

Democrats’ support for same-sex marriage shifted faster

By 2004, the legalization of same-sex marriage started to unfold at the state level. That year, Massachusetts became the first state to allow same-sex couples to marry. President George W. Bush, a Republican, championed a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage on the campaign trail, while Democrats vying for their party’s 2004 presidential nomination said the legalization of same-sex marriage should be left to the states.

At this time, Americans’ support for same-sex marriage was still somewhat limited, and the divide between Republicans and Democrats deepened. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults agreed that same-sex marriage should be permitted, according to the Gallup data. Among Democrats, that agreement was higher — about half were in favor — compared with 22% of Republicans.

Since then, Americans’ upward movement on support for same-sex marriage has been driven by Democrats and independents. Throughout Gallup’s trend, Democrats have been more supportive of same-sex marriage than Republicans have. Since 2006, at least half of Democrats have supported same-sex marriage, and independents started to see consistent majority support in 2012.

Related | Democrats troll Trump with Pride concert at Kennedy Center

The gap between Democrats and Republicans, meanwhile, stayed wide. By 2015, the year of the Supreme Court’s ruling, about three-quarters of Democrats — but only about one-third of Republicans — supported same-sex marriage.

But Republicans did become somewhat more supportive of same-sex marriage between 2010 and 2020. While Democrats continued to lead the shift, Republican public opinion also moved during this decade — signaling a broader movement toward acceptance of same-sex marriage across party lines, even if it wasn’t always linear.

Republicans’ support for same-sex marriage dropped in recent years

About 7 in 10 Americans think marriages between same-sex partners should be recognized by the law as valid, according to Gallup data from this year, which is similar to the latest General Social Survey data showing 63% of U.S. adults agree that same-sex marriage should be considered a right.

But while the public’s support for same-sex marriage ticked up in the years following the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling — from about 60% in 2015 — it has been relatively steady since 2020.

At the same time, Republicans’ support has fallen in each of the past three years. Now, about 4 in 10 Republicans say marriages between same-sex partners should be recognized as legal, down from a record high of 55% in 2021 and 2022. This latest decline by Republicans returns their views to their 2016 measure, when 40% supported legal same-sex marriage.

Gallup Senior Editor Megan Brenan said Republicans’ recent shift in opinion on same-sex marriage is dramatic.

“This was a much steeper fall from 2022 through 2025,” she said. “And now, of course, we have the widest partisan gap that we’ve seen in the trends.”

Younger and older Republicans split on same-sex marriage

Even as overall Republican support for same-sex marriage declines, a generational split within the party suggests that opposition may not hold in the long run.

People participate in the World Pride Rally at the Lincoln Memorial on June 8.

Among Republicans under age 50, about 6 in 10 say same-sex marriages should be legally recognized, the Gallup poll finds. That stands in stark contrast to just 36% of Republicans over 50 who say the same —- suggesting that views on the issue could continue to shift.

Overall, younger adults are significantly more likely to support legal recognition of same-sex marriage. About 8 in 10 adults under 35 are in favor, compared with roughly 7 in 10 between ages 35 and 54 and 6 in 10 among those 55 or older.

Brenan noted that younger Americans are more accepting of same-sex marriage than older adults are, and it’s an issue that especially appears to divide Republicans today.

“I think that’s a key to where things will be headed, presumably,” Brenan said. “Historically, people have become more conservative as they age, but this is an issue that’s so ingrained in society today and especially younger society.”

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