Want LGBT rights? This is where to focus.

Data suggest that progress is most feasible in these key states.

A poll from early this month showed that a majority of people in every state favored non-discrimination laws protecting the LGBT community. This support, however, is not reflected in state law.

Twenty-nine states allow employers or landlords to discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender identity. At the federal level, Congress has recently proposed the Equality Act, which would extend civil rights to the LGBT community. But with a conservative Senate, few are optimistic that the bill will pass Congress, let alone the Commander in Chief.

While waiting on any kind of federal protection, there is plenty of progress to be made on the state level. Numbers show that some states need only a small nudge to make these protections a reality.

Anti-discrimination laws

Here is a link to the Jupyter notebooks where the data were cleaned and manipulated.

In the map below, I’ve highlighted the states that lack LGBT anti-discrimination laws. I’ve applied a simple heuristic* that combines two questions: What percentage of the state’s legislature is controlled by Democrats? And what percentage of the state’s population approves of these anti-discrimination laws? Polling data is pulled from PRRI and legal data is taken from the HRC.