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The 2024 election has been a bit weird for President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats. According to most polls, the president’s support among traditionally Democratic constituencies has slipped severely. Significant numbers of Black voters, Latino voters and young voters — who turned out strongly for Biden during his 2020 victory — seem to be prepared to sit out the election, or even cross over to vote for Donald Trump.
Will LGBTQ Americans, another bedrock Democratic constituency, join that movement?
The limited polling we have puts Biden well ahead among LGBTQ voters. But to win in November, Biden doesn’t just need to beat Trump among LGBTQ voters. He needs to win by the kind of majorities he posted in 2020.
And on that front, the two recent polls we have tell an unclear story.
Exit polling in 2020 had Biden beating Trump among LGBTQ voters by 64 percent to 27 percent — a 37-point advantage. One poll, released in March by the LGTBQ visibility group GLAAD, put Biden’s 2024 election support roughly on par with where it was in 2020 exit polling. But another, from the nonpartisan Independent Center think tank, showed his margin over Trump slipping down to a 29-point edge.
(There’s a caveat here: Ideally, we’d have more polls of LGBTQ voters to draw from. Additionally, LGBTQ voters are not a monolith, and anecdotes suggest real cleavages within the community. But polling down to the subgroup level gets difficult, as small sample sizes yield unreliable results. So we’re working with what we have.)
So which is it? Is Biden hemorrhaging support among LGBTQ voters? Or is his support holding steady?
After discussions with experts and deep dives into the polling, a more nuanced depiction of LGBTQ voters comes together.
On the one hand, LGBTQ voters are becoming more numerous, as greater shares of the American public than ever before feel comfortable coming out and identifying as something other than heterosexual. As this identity becomes more mainstream, it’s possible that the perspectives of its members will as well, with their views coming to resemble those of the public as a whole. Specifically and in the current context, that would mean an increased focus on the economy, and a de-emphasis on issues of identity.
But in the case of LGBTQ voters, broader public acceptance has not been matched by more supportive treatment from elected officials. In recent years, the Republican Party has leaned hard into transphobia and against LGBTQ visibility in public life — a force that may push more members of the community away from the GOP and back toward Democrats.
The picture that emerges is a voting group shifting its priorities and diversifying its viewpoints as it grows, but despite that communal metamorphosis, the community may remain tightly loyal to Democrats in 2024 — thanks to a Republican Party that is moving away from LGBTQ voters faster than they’re approaching it.
Why LGBTQ voters have traditionally picked Dems over the GOP
Though a small segment of the electorate (they made up about 7 percent of the 2020 electorate), LGBTQ voters have proven to be an influential part of the Democratic coalition. They have tended to be a higher-propensity voting group — likelier than the average voter to turn out.
“It’s kind of remarkable that LGBT voters are actually as cohesive as they are,” Andrew Flores, an assistant professor of government at American University, told me. “How does one’s experience maybe growing up in a very wealthy household, maybe a southern conservative environment, gel with someone who maybe grew up working-class, Latino, and in an urban center?”
Flores and other scholars of LGBTQ identity use two complementary theories to describe and explain how LGBTQ voters came to behave as a voting bloc:
- A sense of linked fate between and among LGBTQ people and
- Encounters with “conversion experiences” that expose LGBTQ people to discrimination and adversity.
Under the “linked fate” framework, LGBTQ people’s cohesion as a group is explained by these voters looking out into the world and making up their mind about politics by thinking of themselves not as individuals, but as a community. “They ask the question ‘what would this party do to queer people,’ as opposed to ‘am I directly going to be affected by voting this way or that way?’,” Flores said. “ You think about what the outcomes would be for the group, and you tie your fate to what you think would be the group’s outcome.”
The “conversion experience” framework also emphasizes the power of community, but adversity plays a bigger role. Through encounters with discrimination in the workplace, everyday stigma, and violence, marginalization reinforces the importance of that queer identity.
“Adversity does kind of reinforce how important identity is to your well-being,” Flores said.
Reinforcing both theories is the role of the coming-out experience: Flores pointed to research from Hunter College that found the age range in which young lesbian, gay, and bisexual people experienced the coming out process also tended to be the time in which they became more politically progressive, in addition to becoming more politically aware and engaged.
“So there is this idea that coming out and affirming that identity reinforces how much politics can be an important factor for these individuals, and also led to them becoming slightly less religious as well,” Flores said. “So the actual process of coming out might have some transformative aspects to it that may cut across race, ethnicity, and class components [of individual identity].”
Are LGBTQ voters abandoning Biden? The case for “yes.”
While polling of LGBTQ Americans can be difficult, trends over the last few election cycles do show some churn in the community’s voting. From 1992 to 2016, exit polling showed a consistent trend with the LGBTQ share of the electorate getting more Democratic.
In 2012, for example, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney among these voters by more than 50 points, garnering the support of about three-quarters of this demographic. In 2016, Hillary Clinton widened this margin into a chasm, winning 77 percent of the LGBTQ vote and holding a 63-point advantage over Trump, who tied with George H. W. Bush for the worst Republican performance with these voters in history.
But 2020 was different. Trump improved over that 2016 rock-bottom. Just how large that improvement was is still under dispute, but it’s generally agreed upon that Trump won at least a quarter of LGBTQ voters, cutting into the Democratic margin by at least 20 points.
The most recent polling shows this balance holding steady, or even continuing to shift away from Biden. The most optimistic poll, released by GLAAD and a Democratic pollster, shows Biden holding about the same share of the LGBTQ vote as he did in 2020; the more concerning one from the Independent Center shows additional erosion, winning about 56 percent of the vote.
Additional signs of discontent and change come from what LGBTQ voters are telling pollsters about the 2024 election. They state that, just like the average American, the economy, prices, and inflation are their top concerns when deciding their vote. A significant share also routinely tell pollsters that they identify as moderates, centrists, or independents. And the Independent Center survey also found that even if LGBTQ Americans identify as more progressive than the average American, they still want their elected officials to be more centrist.
“Part of the reason [we see some changes] is that people might just feel more comfortable coming out because there’s no stigma attached,” Gabriele Magni, an assistant professor of political science at Loyola Marymount University, told me. “There is more acceptance, more positive role models, and younger people feel more comfortable talking about their orientation and gender identity because of this.”
That shift toward mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ identity also raises an interesting question backed up by these voter trends: as LGBTQ Americans feel less rejection, grow as a segment of the population, and gain rights and protections, it’s possible that this element of their identities becomes less central and salient to how they make political and voting decisions, and other aspects of class, race, or education become more important.
Other groups have followed this trajectory previously. Among white Americans, for example, Italian American, Irish American, and Catholic voters have historically behaved as voting blocs in various eras of US politics. They backed Democrats before shifting into swing-voter status or dissolving as a discrete category as they faced less discrimination, diversified, and became part of mainstream white America.
Since the start of the Trump era, too, Hispanic and Latino Americans, previously a sharply defined bedrock Democratic constituency, have become a larger share of the electorate, assimilated, and become the country’s newest swing voters.
And polling of this election even shows distinct divisions within Democrats’ most loyal voting group: young Black voters and older Black voters have different degrees of affinity for Democrats, potentially because of fading memories of the Civil Rights era.
Are LGBTQ voters abandoning Biden? The case for “no.”
But while the LGBTQ community has undergone changes, so has the GOP. Patrick Egan, an associate professor of politics and public policy at NYU, told me that the Republican Party’s active role in antagonizing LGBTQ people cannot be understated.
Egan, who was also one of the researchers behind the Hunter College study on coming out experiences, said the GOP’s turn against LGBTQ people, their identity, and their rights is a major reason voters won’t consider these candidates.
“Typically when marginalized groups gain rights and power, the expectation is that they’ll kind of look a little bit more like the general electorate. In this case, it would not be a bit surprising to see LGBTQ voters start to become more conservative, more drawn to the Republican Party, as they get marriage and as they get non-discrimination protections, etc,” he said. “What’s really remarkable is that we’re just not seeing it.”
Had the Republican Party continued to move in a more liberal direction, it might have been more likely that 2024 would see more of a political realignment among these voters.
In 2010, when Congress passed legislation repealing the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy banning LGBTQ servicemembers from serving openly in the military, eight Senate Republicans and 15 House Republicans joined Democrats in supporting repeal. In 2022, 11 Senate Republicans and 47 House Republicans voted to codify protections for same-sex marriages.
But in recent years, Republicans have embraced an anti-transgender panic. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has led this charge, but he’s backed by other prominent officials and media figures, and GOP-led state legislatures in many states have passed anti-trans legislation.
This shift has likely made LGBTQ identity more salient to members of the community, driving them away from a hostile GOP.
This also shows up in polling: Though there’s broad dissatisfaction with Biden and his presidency and a desire for the Democratic Party to do more to protect the rights of queer and trans Americans, views of the Republican Party and Trump are significantly more negative. And baked into some of the concerns about the economy and inflation is a desire by LGBTQ voters for the Republican Party to care more about kitchen-table issues than about social or culture war fascinations, like banning medical care for trans youth.
“Regardless of your positions on other issues, to the extent that being queer is important to you, you’re seeing big, big differences between the two parties on this very, very important issue. And so that’s going to keep a lot of LGBTQ voters voting for Democrats who otherwise would find the Republican Party more favorable,” Egan said.
Still, every expert I spoke with reached a similar conclusion — that none of this should lull Democrats into complacency, and that it’s not a given that LGBTQ voters will forever stay loyal Democrats.
“Generational turnover happens. Replacement happens. And you might get a more progressive LGBTQ voting bloc in the short term, but in the long, long run, the notion that you might have LGBTQ people who will vote Republican or who will not have to think about their LGBTQ identity as a factor of their vote is sort of a measure of success for the movement,” Flores said. “Greater political heterogeneity might be a signal that these identities are no longer being politicized or marginalized. But it’s hard to look out at contemporary politics and say that that’s going to happen right now.”
