Report: LGBTQ Voters Shifted Away from Trump in 2024 Election
Trump's support among LBGTQ voters eroded amid a campaign filled with anti-LGBTQ and anti-transgender rhetoric.
While he ran up greater margins of victory or increased his share of almost every demographic group, President-elect Donald Trump actually bled support among members of the LGBTQ community in this year’s election.
According to an NBC News exit poll, 86% of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender voters cast their ballots for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, a 22-point increase over 2020, when Biden won 64% of the LGBTQ vote.
Only 12% of LGBTQ voters cast ballots for Trump, a 15-point decline from four years ago, reports The Hill. The GOP presidential ticket captured fewer than 20% of LGBTQ male voters and just 8% of LGBTQ female voters.
The results align with an earlier poll by the Human Rights Campaign, in which LGBTQ voters favored Harris over Trump by a 74% to 7.5% spread.
Much of Trump’s campaign focused on championing anti-political correctness and anti-transgender rhetoric, attacking Harris over her past support for gender-affirming care, including surgical interventions for incarcerated prisoners. Other attack ads against Democrats lambasted them for supporting transgender athletes in women’s sports or supporting gender-affirming care for trans youth.
Trump also frequently invoked “transgender insanity” to stir up Republican base voters, raising the specter of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and Olympic boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting (who were both assigned female at birth) as examples of “men” competing against women in sports.
He pledged to ban transgender women from female-designated athletic competitions — something the House of Representatives has previously approved — once elected president.
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance (R-Ohio) also spread anti-LGBTQ canards, telling podcast host Joe Rogan that more young people are identifying as transgender to better their chances of acceptance into elite colleges and universities — a claim that has not been verified.
During that interview, Vance also predicted that the Republican ticket would win the “normal gay guy vote” — an attempt to sow division between component parts of the LGBTQ community by casting non-conservative LGBTQ males as “radical” or “extreme.”
Meanwhile, a Fox News exit poll found that 20% of LGBTQ voters said they voted for Trump — a number larger than NBC’s figure, but still constituting a smaller percentage than Trump won four years ago. Meanwhile, 78% of LGBTQ respondents to the Fox poll said they voted for Harris.
According to a Gallup poll from March, 7.6% of U.S. adults identify as LGBTQ or “something other than heterosexual,” including more than 1 in 5 members of Generation Z.
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