Queer women could be the the ‘secret sauce’ to a Biden-Harris victory – but Democrats are ignoring them
Kamala Harris at San Francisco Pride in 2019. (Gabrielle Lurie/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
The Joe Biden-Kamala Harris campaign has been warned that LGBT+ women’s votes are being overlooked, when they could be the “secret sauce” the Democrats need to win.
While LGBT+ women make up 2.6 per cent of Americans, they hold only 0.04 per cent of positions in political office.
This has been put down to a lack of interest within different campaign committees of the Democratic Party in electing LGBT+ women – something that extends to winning votes for Biden and Harris from LGBT+ women.
This is all according to Lisa Turner, the political director of LPAC, an organisation focused on electing LGBT+ women to political office.
“Democrats are supposed to be ‘big tent’ people,” Turner told Ms Magazine, “but now we’re on the outside looking in.”
Democrats ‘glom queer women in with gay men’.
Turner added that, if mobilised and organised, votes from LGBT+ women could prove crucial in electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
She was speaking after data collected by Lake Research Partners (LRP) and UCLA’s Williams Institute found that Biden and Harris have the support of roughly 221,000 LGBT+ women voters in Florida, 107,000 in North Carolina, and 264,000 in Texas.
And 73 per cent of LGBT+ women are planning to vote for Biden, compared with 53 per cent of cis het women. The research also found that LGBT+ women are highly motivated to vote, with 80 per cent saying they are fired up to cast their ballot in the US election.
“You hear all the time about the enthusiasm gap,” said LRP president Celinda Lake, “but there’s not an enthusiasm gap among LGBTQ women. None. The LGBTQ (women’s) vote is really the secret sauce if you want to gain more women voters.”
Turner said that, although the numbers and commitment to voting should mean LGBT+ women are wooed by Democrats, instead the reality is that these voters are not seen at all.
“The party doesn’t look at LGBTQ women as a unique constituency. Instead they glom us in with gay men, even though the gay male experience is fundamentally different from our own,” she said.
While the LGBT+ voting bloc has long been reliably Democratic, a recent survey by dating app Hornet found that 45 per cent of gay men plan on voting for Trump.
