PRIDE MONTH
Who are LGBT Republicans?
New research on LGBT party organizations and their influence
By: Dr. Andrew Proctor, Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Minnesota — Twin Cities
On June 2, 2021, Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel tweeted:
On its face, McDaniel’s tweet appears true.
Exit polls — which should be interpreted cautiously — show that the LGBT vote for Donald Trump increased from 14 to 27% between 2016 and 2020. However, when compared to exit polls from previous elections, Trump’s 2020 performance is average, with the LGBT Republican vote ranging from a high of 33 percent in 1998 to a low of 19 percent in 2008 (McThomas and Buchanan 2012).[1] In other words, there was nothing exceptional about Trump’s performance, nor was it a shift in the partisan composition of the LGBT electorate.
The exit polls reveal that approximately one-quarter to one-third of LGBT Americans vote for Republicans. If we only consider these data, however, many may wonder: who these voters are and how they make sense of politics in a party that is hostile to LGBT people?
My research about LGBT political organizations, identity formation, and political parties can help answer these questions. It reveals a more complicated story about how power dynamics in political parties have shaped LGBT collective identities, group formation, and partisanship. By collective identities, I mean the shared understandings that group members construct to define who they are and what they want.
Through a historical analysis of LGBT Democratic and Republican clubs, I find that these organizations — and the activists embedded within them — have constructed distinct understandings of their identity and its relationship to partisanship. Organizations across the partisan spectrum have existed since the 1970s, when both parties excluded LGBT people from visible participation and opposed LGBT rights.
On the Democratic side, activists constituted a civil rights collective identity that constructs LGBT people as a minority group who needs protection through government and affirmative laws.
Whereas on the Republican side, activists constituted a civil libertarian identity that constructs LGBT people as individuals who have the right to privacy from the state and government intrusion in their lives. In other words, LGBT conservatives construct their identity around freedom from government, rather than protection through it. This identity can be traced to experiences with state-led discrimination, such as exclusion from the military, purges from civil service positions, and unequal treatment by police.
LGBT Democrats and Republicans have different identities that they link to partisanship in different ways.
Although civil rights and libertarian identities have long existed as ways for LGBT people to understand their marginalization and political orientations, they have not received equal representation by dominant society. My research explains how dominant society influences which identities become recognized and which do not, subsequently shaping group boundaries, collective identities, and their linkage to partisanship.
While the Democratic Party today embraces LGBT people, historically, it was a site of intense conflict over their visibility, inclusion, and rights. Since the 1970s, activists and party actors have engaged in an on-going process of group and identity contestation. In doing so, activists have pushed party actors to represent LGBT people as a civil rights group, which is consistent with how many LGBT people understand themselves. The alignment between the identity constructed by activists and its representation by parties facilitated its institutionalization as a mobilizing identity.
The civil libertarian identity has struggled to institutionalize because of the Republican Party’s alignment with white Evangelicals. The Republican Party has been steadfast and unified against LGBT rights since the 1970s and has actively constituted itself as a party of straight people. For example, the party platform in 1988 prescribed marriage and protecting “those who do not have the disease” in its HIV/AIDS plank. In doing so, the Republican Party constructed boundaries around partisanship that excluded LGBT people from recognition as a group. The failure to represent a civil libertarian identity is an outcome of dominant society “defining what politics is about,” not the absence of its existence among LGBT people.
These dynamics — as they unfold over time — constitute group boundaries around identities. Generally, the most advantaged subgroups of the LGBT community, particularly white gay men, articulate a civil libertarian identity. White gay men have privileged status in racial and gender hierarchies, increasing the likelihood that they may feel assimilated and view their identity in relation to civil liberties and the right to privacy. Subgroups who experience advantages through other identities face fewer barriers to inclusion, even when their collective identity is not well represented by dominant society.
The foregoing discussion highlights how parties shape identity and group formation among LGBT people in the United States. A civil rights minority group identity has institutionalized among LGBT Democrats, while LGBT Republicans construct a civil libertarian identity. These identities differ in content and both shape partisan mobilization.
The boundaries constructed around the civil libertarian identity intersect with racial and gender hierarchies, demonstrating how parties structure intersecting inequalities and identities in American politics. This helps explain why there is a persistent Republican vote that makes up about one-quarter to one-third of the LGBT electorate, despite the party’s hostility to LGBT people.
References
McThomas, M., & Buchanan, R. 2012. President Obama and Gay Rights: The 2008 and 2012 Presidential Elections. PS: Political Science & Politics, 45(3), 442–448.
[1] Older estimates generally do not include transgender people and are really estimates of the LGB vote.
For other posts in this mini-symposium coordinated by Professor Ken Sherrill, see:
