Supporters hold up an LGBT+ Pride flag for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. (George Frey/Getty Images
The number of LGBT+ people who voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election more than double compared to four years ago, exit polls suggest.
With a bitter and strained electoral battle unfolding and an anxious nation awaiting a winner, a patchwork of exit polls have begun to show the numbers that will shape debate for months to come – who voted for who.
And according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research for the National Election Pool, the sturdy trend that LGBT+ people vote Democratic has remained, but more voted for Trump this time around than in 2016.
A slither of just 14 per cent LGBT+ people voted for the Trump-Pence ticket in 2016 – even despite the pair’s anti-LGBT+ track records.
Come 2020, and that figure has doubled to 28 per cent who voted for the Trump-Pence ticket – even despite the absolute onslaught of anti-queer attacks by the administration.
Around 61 per cent of LGBT+ voters went for Biden at the ballots. The study found that of the 15,590 voters interviewed, around seven per cent were LGBT+.
The exit poll comes after survey-taskers in September found around 45 per cent of queer men were vying to vote Trump.
As much as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has netted an, albeit, slim majority of the queer male vote, securing 51 per cent, it signalled to pollsters how the president’s brand of bullish showmanship has roiled the political landscape.
Indeed, the LGBT+ voting bloc has long been reliably Democratic. The poll conducted by queer dating app Hornet found that, overall among its users, around 66 per cent prefer Biden while 34 per cent support Trump.
But for queer Americans, pollsters said, the statistics were far tighter together. Just less than half of queer men said they do not support Trump, and a slither of just 11 per cent said they generally disagree with his stances.
Donald Trump is billed as a pro-LGBT+ president, but queer people beg to disagree.
Trump and his campaign team increasingly looked towards LGBT+ people as a way to buttress support amid the president’s cratering polls.
Among some of the Republican’s core voting blocs, such as white evangelicals, many do at least generally support LGBT+ rights, according to a 2019 survey.
But the president’s track record has seen him harshly erode many pre-existing LGBT+ rights. Trans rights, in particular, have been taken to with a buzz saw by the Trump administration, across countless federal departments and programs – defence, housing, health and education.
Moreover, during many of this year’s victories in the arena of LGBT+ rights as well as years’ worth of Pride months, Trump has remained silent or vastly indifferent.
And when the president has been pressed about certain LGBT+ issues, such as the federal blood ban on queer men as well as his own campaign for the global decriminalisation of homosexuality, he has been utterly clueless.