You can’t blame LGBT activists for being deflated. June has been a painful reminder of the Left’s diminished influence in what was supposed to be the cause’s crowning month. Instead, the country is flooded with headlines that only confirm the backseat Pride is taking in America’s collective — and corporate — consciousness. And while a lot of the support for a rainbow-saturated summer has evaporated, some corners of the Left are desperately trying to proclaim that the movement hasn’t entirely lost its grip.

GLAAD, one of the largest LGBT advocacy groups outside the Human Rights Campaign, surprised a number of people this month with a new poll supposedly showing a massive spike in the number of Americans who want companies to embrace LGBT Pride. The results, which run counter to every cultural trend we’ve witnessed in the last few years, seemed too good to be true for the beleaguered cause. And digging deeper, they almost certainly are.

The first red flag was the lack of transparency. As most journalists know, any reputable survey should include a set of crosstabs that outline the exact questions that were asked, which demographics answered them (based on age, sex, ethnicity, political party, marital status, education level, etc.), and how. And yet the only methodology available is that the poll was conducted between March 16 and April 2 with 5,010 “nationally representative U.S. adults.” Without the statistical breakdown, it’s impossible to know anything about the sample group — including their ideological leanings. Are they all from blue states like California and Massachusetts? Do they all identify as LGBT? Are they all Gen Z?

Yet GLAAD’s announcement suspiciously omits those details, opting instead for colorful graphics, each with a single data point that the reader is meant to accept as fact. When The Washington Stand requested the crosstabs, which should be standard practice with any legitimate poll, the organization didn’t reply. In other words, we’re just supposed to take GLAAD’s word for it.

Maybe part of the problem — in addition to GLAAD’s obvious desire to hide the detailed data — lies with the survey company itself: MRI-Simmons. From at least 2014-2017, the company had lost its accreditation after the board of the Media Rating Council voted to strip it. According to an independent audit, there were “declines in service performance metrics,” which is a serious problem for an organization in the business of numbers.

But even if the poll results were authenticated and readers were privy to the specifics, GLAAD’s interpretation of them is undeniably skewed. Even the header of the report, “Supermajority of Americans Support Brands Participating in Pride,” is suspect. “What does ‘participating in Pride’ even mean?” the Heritage Foundation’s Stefan Padfield asked in a sit-down with TWS. There’s no description of what qualifies as “participating.” “If the intent is to make the reader believe a supermajority of Americans support brands sponsoring Pride events, then it’s important to note that the poll results don’t require that conclusion.” Based on the actual results they report, Padfield argued, “They’re taking a leap. If you want to be charitable, at the very least, they’re taking an additional step from what the actual questions and answers would allow you to conclude.”

Padfield, who serves as the principal of Heritage’s Free Enterprise Initiative, believes none of the questions add up to the conclusion that Americans want companies to embrace Pride.

Here’s one of the dubious survey outcomes: “74% of registered voters are more likely to support a midterm candidate who says, ‘We all deserve the freedom to live our lives without fear of discrimination.’” Don’t we all want that? Aren’t we all looking for candidates who promote basic liberties and tolerance? But if GLAAD’s underlying agenda here was to imply that LGBT-identifying people deserve to live without fear or discrimination, that was never specified. The question implied everyone. And frankly, after the last several years of persecution, targeting, and harassment, conservatives are just as likely to desire a life free of cultural oppression as anyone. Look at the pattern of government weaponization against men and women of faith, who were broadly marginalized for their religion under Joe Biden. Believers may have a friendlier administration in the White House now, but the pattern of Christian hostility continues today, as a former executive of the Washington Nationals reminded everyone on an undercover tape just two weeks ago.

A second data point: “62% are comfortable with brands allowing employees to march in Pride parades.” This is absurd. No one, including conservatives, is suggesting that corporations should bar staffers from joining Pride events or celebrations — or that they be punished for doing so. The question is whether a corporate sponsorship — something quite different from individual participation — is in the best interest of the brand’s reputation and bottom line.

Third: “68% agree brands/companies should be able to show support to the LGBTQ community during Pride if they want to.” Again, what does “showing support” mean? Posting a single tweet is quite different from forking over millions of dollars as an NYC Pride Platinum Sponsor. Again, Padfield reiterated to TWS, the point isn’t that businesses shouldn’t be allowed to “support the LGBT community. The question is whether doing so in a public sponsorship capacity is a net gain or loss for the corporation, its shareholders, and society at large.”

Fourth: “76% are more likely to trust a brand that sticks to its values and stands up for what is right, even if it is controversial.” Nothing in this question specifies what kind of “values” GLAAD is referring to. What if the majority of respondents define “standing up for what’s right” as opposing transgenderism? There are plenty of CEOs who’ve decided that sticking to their principles means backing away from the Human Rights Campaign and other forms of LGBT radicalism. The same goes for the 73% who “feel CEOs have a responsibility to speak up about issues that matter to their consumers and shareholders.” It cuts both ways. This could just as easily apply to the businesses that openly oppose the gender mutilation of children.

To Stefan, this is one of the glaring issues with GLAAD’s poll. “One of the critical issues around all of this is that there are a lot of people who are saying, ‘Why don’t you stand up and say no to some of this stuff? Why are you out there waving these Progress flags? You seem to be okay with like the worst of it — the issues that 70% of people are against.’” As far as he’s concerned, “If you, as a corporate CEO or a board of directors, want to make a business decision to support this, then you need to have answered some hard questions. You should be able to respond clearly to things like, ‘Do you believe a child can be born in the wrong body? Do you think a child should be subjected to sex change surgery behind the backs of their parents? How do you define the word woman?’ And if you’re not letting people know where you stand, then that’s a problem. It’s actually a breach of duty, because you’re making a business decision that puts billions of shareholder dollars at risk.”

Fifth: “65% of registered voters believe politicians are often using transgender issues as a distraction from more important priorities.” This is equally unsurprising. For the last decade, Americans have been force-fed a steady diet of radical gender ideology from the Democratic Party — whether it’s the push to open girls’ bathrooms and sports teams to men, to trans our military, prisons, and homeless shelters, to fly Progress flags over our embassies, to demand taxpayer-funded hormones and surgeries for children while schools hide kids’ identity from their parents, or to put preferred pronouns in every signature line. No doubt voters are exhausted from this barrage and wish the Left would concentrate on common-sense issues.

At the end of the day, the intentional vagueness of these questions dilutes the message GLAAD so badly wants to convey, which is that Pride is suddenly popular again. And yet, even if their methodology were trustworthy and the results completely transparent, every cultural and corporate marker would still disagree. Even in Gallup’s latest survey on this same issue from 2025, there’s no way to tell if people’s growing desire for companies to take a public stance is for or against the Left’s agenda. The substance of that stance is never defined. “It has to be on the table if the question is not sufficiently narrowed,” Padfield agrees, that people are thinking they want businesses and brands to reject political extremism, especially in this anti-woke climate.

A generous take would be that GLAAD’s poll is an outlier. But it’s a lot more likely that the organization is trying to save face for a struggling movement with an intellectually dishonest survey. Either way, when the rest of the Left is admitting that Pride is on “life support,” we should probably believe them.