Community Resources

A recent poll of Arizona voters finds strong support for comprehensive federal protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Americans. Voters also believe that protecting Americans from discrimination should be a top priority for Congress, even more so than getting COVID under control.  They are more likely to vote for a U.S. Senator who takes on a leadership role to pass a bipartisan compromise to protect LGBT rights.  While individual aspects of the Equality Act were popular, the Equality Act itself was not well known.

Key Findings 

• Arizona voters strongly support federal protections for LGBT Americans. Protections focused on preventing gay and transgender people from being fired due to their sexual orientation or gender identity (64% more likely to support) and protecting equal access to medical and mental health services for gay and transgender people (61% more likely) are the most popular components of the Equality Act. For independent voters, protections for LGBT workers and employees were the most compelling (61%). Eviction protections, anti-bullying policies, and banning social safety net programs from denying services based on someone's sexual orientation or gender identity were also extremely popular (59% more likely).

• Protecting all Americans from discrimination is seen as a high priority for Congress, even more important than dealing with COVID. About two-thirds of voters say that “protecting all Americans from discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religious preference” should be a very important priority for Congress to address (65%), putting it ahead of “getting the coronavirus pandemic under control” (56%).

• Voters are more likely to support their U.S. Senator if they take on a leadership role to pass a bipartisan compromise to protect gay and transgender rights. Taking this action would make voters more likely to support their Senator by a 14-point margin (38% more likely to vote for them / 24% less).

• Most Arizona voters are not familiar with the Equality Act. Just 14% of voters have heard “a lot” about the bill and a majority has not heard much about it (50% have heard “not too much” + “nothing”), demonstrating that more needs to be done to raise awareness. A plurality of voters (21%) had heard mixed, both positive and negative, messages about the Equality Act. 

• Arizona Voters are more likely to support a federal law protecting LGBT rights if it is bipartisan. By a more than two to one margin (24% to 10%), voters said they were more likely to support a bill to protect gay and transgender rights knowing it “was written and proposed by both Democratic and Republican U.S. Senators.”  

• After hearing the individual LGBT protections contained in it, Arizona voters support the Equality Act. A strong majority of 59% support passing the bill, with just 28% opposed to it. Intense support for the bill is also high, with 45% strongly supporting it, 17 points above the total share opposed to it. Support is near-unanimous among Democrats (93%), and Independents also support passing the Equality Act by a greater than 2:1 margin (56% support / 27% oppose). Strong majorities of white (58%) and Latinx (69%) voters also support the bill, with majority support spanning age, gender, and educational attainment lines as well.

These findings are based on the results of a bilingual telephone and text-to-web survey conducted by ALG Research from October 26 – November 1, 2021 among N=600 likely 2022 GE voters in Arizona. 75% of interviews were conducted via cell phones, while the remaining 25% were conducted using landlines. The margin of error for the full sample is +/- 4.0% at the 95% level of confidence. The margin of error for subgroups varies and is higher.