THE RESULTS of the November election are both too sweeping and too dismal to cover in a single op-ed piece. Here are a few takes on the election as excerpted from LGBT media sources soon after November 5th.
THE ADVOCATE
LGBTQ+ Political Wins in an Otherwise Devastating Election
There were a number of notable victories for LGBTQ+ candidates and causes in Tuesday’s election. Some highlights:
• Sarah McBride, currently a Delaware state senator, won election as the state’s sole representative in the U.S. House. She will be the first out transgender member of Congress. She is a Democrat, as are all the LGBTQ+ politicians mentioned here.
• Tammy Baldwin won reelection as a U.S. senator from Wisconsin in a tight race over Republican challenger Eric Hovde, who ran a campaign marked by thinly veiled homophobia.
• Emily Randall was elected to the U.S. House from Washington state’s Sixth Congressional District. Randall, a lesbian, will be the state’s first LGBTQ + member of Congress, and the first LGBTQ+ Latina elected to that body from any state. She is currently a state senator.
• Julie Johnson, was elected to the U.S. House from Texas’ 32nd Congressional District. An out lesbian, she will be the first LGBTQ + member of Congress from any Southern state.
• All incumbent LGBTQ + U.S. House members won reelection: Becca Balint of Vermont, Chris Pappas of New Hampshire, Ritchie Torres of New York, Eric Sorensen of Illinois, Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, Angie Craig of Minnesota, Sharice Davids of Kansas, and Robert Barcia and Mark Takano of California. Their reelection plus the election of three new representatives brings the number of LGBTQ+ House members to twelve, an all-time high.
LGBTQnation.com
Exit Poll Shows 86% of LGBT People Voted for Harris
LGBTQ+ people voted Democrat more in 2024 compared to 2020, according to this poll. Edison Research, the firm that conducts national election exit polling for CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC, found that 86% of respondents who identified as “gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender” voted for Kamala Harris, while 13% voted for Donald Trump. (Note that the poll was only conducted in ten “key” states and sampled only early in-person voters. The survey involved 22,509 respondents.)
If the Edison exit poll in 2024 is an accurate reflection of LGBTQ+ people’s voting patterns, then it shows a strong shift to the left in the LGBTQ+ population in the last four years. This could be because of the nonstop attacks on LGBTQ+ people coming from the right in the form of attacks on transgender youth’s rights to healthcare and equal education.
GLAAD
Ballot Measures Strengthened the Freedom to Marry
Alongside the presidential race and major races in U.S. Congress and state legislatures, Americans voted to enact groundbreaking ballot measures that will improve LGBTQ lives. Voters in Colorado, California, and Hawaii passed ballot measures enshrining freedom to marry protections into their state Constitutions. The 61% majority of California voters who said Yes to marriage equality in 2024 is an especially meaningful leap in public opinion in contrast to the passage of Proposition 8 in 2008, which banned marriage equality.
Twenty years ago, opposing marriage equality was a winning political wedge issue for Republicans. In 2004, more than a dozen state-level constitutional amendments flooded the country seeking to preemptively prohibit marriage equality, and President George W. Bush ran on a platform of banning marriage for same-sex couples at the federal level. Currently, according to 2024 Gallup polling, a near-record high of more than two-thirds of Americans support the freedom to marry—compared to 27% of Americans who did so when Gallup first started polling about the topic in 1996, and 68% who did not.
Washington Blade
Dems Must Not Abandon Trans People after Trump’s Win
As Democrats look inward following Vice President Kamala Harris’ electoral defeat, the party must not abandon transgender people or cede the fight to expand rights and protections for the community, National LGBTQ Task Force Action Fund President Kierra Johnson told the Washington Blade.
President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign, and those run by other Republican candidates, spent tens of millions on anti-trans ads leading up to the election, a messaging strategy that has been credited with energizing the conservative base and ultimately defeating Democrats like U.S. Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), who ran for Ted Cruz’ (R-Texas) U.S. Senate seat. Others doubt whether the issue had much, if any, impact on the elections, especially the presidential race, arguing that the results are better explained by headwinds like the post-pandemic disadvantage faced by incumbent leaders around the world, or by a realignment of the American electorate.
Challenging the theory that the anti-trans advertising was effective, Johnson said, is: (1) the success of so many LGBTQ candidates like Delaware State Sen. Sarah McBride, who made history with her election to become the first transgender member of Congress; and (2) the fact that Trump and his allies did not just leverage anti-trans messaging in their campaigns, but also leaned into other forms of bigotry, from fear mongering about immigrant communities to racist attacks focused on Harris’s biracial identity.
