President Donald Trump shared a tweet with his 86 million followers applauding a new poll that found 45 percent of American gay men surveyed plan to cast their ballots for him in November.
“Great!” Trump wrote Sunday in a quote retweet about the survey’s results.
The survey was conducted by the gay social network Hornet. The company said it solicited survey responses from its user base and received 10,000 worldwide responses to its candidate poll. The global results found Trump trailing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, 34 percent to 66 percent, but when breaking out the 1,200 respondents who reported being U.S. citizens, the difference went from 32 points to 6, Trump at 45 percent and Biden 51 percent.
Hornet, which says it has more than 25 million users worldwide, cautioned that the survey was a “voluntary opt-in” exercise and not a representative survey that could predict voter turnout for the 2020 election.
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“In effect, the only thing truly measured by Hornet’s results are the opinions of those Hornet users who chose to take the survey, not the broader Hornet user base, not gay American men, and most definitely not the broader American LGBTQ community,” the company’s website stated following media coverage of the poll. “Nevertheless, the data presented below is an interesting peek into a community — queer men — that is rarely surveyed, despite available data concerning the LGBTQ community as a whole.”
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer voters have historically been a reliably Democratic voting bloc. In the 2016 presidential election, 78 percent of LGBTQ voters reported backing Hillary Clinton, while just 14 percent said they supported Trump, according to exit polls. And in 2018, exit polls found 82 percent of LGBTQ voters backed their districts’ Democratic candidates.
Last year, the Log Cabin Republicans, an LGBTQ conservative group, endorsed Donald Trump for re-election, despite not backing him in 2016. The endorsement caused ripples in the organization, and even led to the resignation of the group’s executive director.
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Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Republican National Committee did not adopt a new platform for the 2020 presidential election, choosing to run on the party’s 2016 platform. That platform condemned the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage across the country, and called for a return to traditional marriage, “based on marriage between one man and one woman,” as the “foundation for a free society.”
Additionally, the platform called for the expansion of “Religious Liberty” laws that have been used to allow businesses to deny services to LGBTQ people, which the Center for American Progress says is a “license to discriminate against LGBTQ people, women religious minorities, and nonreligious people.”