Today is 4/20, the holiday dedicated to cannabis culture and consumption. Four years ago on this date, I wrote a piece for FiveThirtyEight about how congressional Republicans’ widespread opposition to a 2022 bill decriminalizing marijuana was increasingly out of step with the views of their constituents.
Not only was there majority support for legalization in all 50 states at that time, but there was a sharp increase in the share of Republicans who supported legal weed from 2014 to 2022. Polling from the early 2020s, in fact, consistently showed that pluralities, if not majorities, of Republicans supported legalizing cannabis for recreational use.
Declining Republican support
But that upward trend in GOP support dramatically reversed itself over the past few years.
Gallup’s chart shows that GOP support for legalization increased alongside Democrats and Independents for almost two decades. The share of Republicans who thought marijuana use should be legal grew from 29% in 2010 to a record high of 55% in 2023. But then it plummeted to just 40% by November 2025.
The exact same trends appear in other polling as well. In YouGov surveys, GOP support for marijuana legalization rose from 28% in 2015 to 46% in 2022 before falling back down to just 35% in April 2026. In Civiqs polls, the share of Republicans who think cannabis use should be legal climbed to a high of 48% in 2022 before dropping to 39% by 2026.
This abrupt downward shift in GOP support has led to record-high partisan polarization over legal weed. Democrats are now at least 45 percentage points more supportive of legalization than Republicans in both the Gallup and Civiqs data.
Younger Republicans are driving the decline
Civiqs’ consistent polling of nearly 350,000 respondents from July 2017 through April 2026 provides additional insights into these trends. Their tracking data reveal that younger Republicans are disproportionately driving the party’s declining support for legal cannabis.
The chart shows that net support for legal cannabis among Republicans under 35 increased from +6 at the start of 2018 to a high of +35 in the spring of 2022. Net support from younger Republicans has steadily eroded since then, reaching a low of +2 earlier this year.
Support for marijuana legalization has also fallen among older Republicans, but less dramatically. Net support among Republicans over the age of 50 has only declined by about 10 points from its 2022 high. The upshot is that the age gap between younger and older Republicans is at an all-time low in Civiqs’ data.
Part of a pattern
It’s difficult to pinpoint why exactly support for legal weed has declined. But these results appear to be part of a broader pattern in which long-term trends in Republicans’ opinions of ostensibly “settled” social issues have recently reversed.
Gallup, for example, shows an identical pattern in GOP opinions of same sex marriage. Republican support for marriage equality increased from 28% in 2010 to a high of 55% in 2022. It then dropped to just 41% in 2025.
Colette Marcelin, John Sides, and I also showed that after decades of declining support for traditional roles among Americans of all partisan affiliations, the share of Republicans who thought that women should return to their traditional roles in society increased 15 percentage points from May 2022 to November 2024.
These striking shifts create real uncertainty about issues that were all trending towards bipartisan consensus, especially among younger Americans who had been socialized in these liberalizing environments. Instead, we are seeing partisan conflicts expand even further into record polarization between Democrats and Republicans over marijuana, marriage equality, and traditional gender roles.
