Gay voters are smitten with Kamala Harris

In the days after President Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the election, a short clip from 2013 went viral on Twitter. It showed the then attorney-general of California speaking to the County Clerk of Los Angeles on the phone: “This is Kamala Harris—you must start marriages immediately.” The Supreme Court had just dismissed a case brought by opponents of same-sex marriage and Ms Harris was instructing the clerk to get to work.

The video struck a chord with Twitter users celebrating that the now-vice-president would assume the Democratic nomination. Polls suggest lesbian, gay and bisexual voters swung behind Ms Harris in the following weeks, helping put her within reach of the presidency (data were not available for trans voters). But despite the hype, neither of the major-party nominees has spent much time courting gay voters. LGB people seem to like Ms Harris anyway. Her opponents in the Republican Party are either not interested in, or hostile to, wooing voters from the growing bloc.

In The Economist’s large-sample analysis of voting behaviour, we find that being gay or lesbian had the third-largest effect on a voter’s support for Ms Harris—all else held equal—after being black or an atheist (see chart 1). Their attachment to the Democrats is long-standing, reflecting the party’s historical connection to queer activism, but that does not mean support for the Democratic nominee is assured. Over the course of 2024, as his candidacy withered, polling by YouGov showed support for Mr Biden fell from around 71% to 64% of lesbian, gay and bisexual voters (see second chart).

Ms Harris’s entry into the election galvanised this group. In the first weeks of her candidacy, her vote share leapt by 14 percentage points with LGB voters, while increasing by only three points among straight ones. In YouGov’s data, it was gay voters who delivered Ms Harris’s polling surge over the summer. This gap has closed slightly since, but she still holds a solid lead among LGB voters. Though the group makes up less than 9% of YouGov’s respondents, Ms Harris’s 61-point lead among them is enough to outweigh her four-point deficit among straight voters.

LGB voters’ support for Ms Harris is overwhelming despite her campaign being relatively quiet on gay issues. The Democratic Party platform includes a commitment to outlaw discrimination, as it did in 2020, but she does not often refer to gay people in her stump speech. Nor does she routinely trumpet achievements of the Biden administration, such as delivering federal protections for same-sex marriage.

Part of Ms Harris’s appeal, compared with Mr Biden, is that, coming from San Francisco, a gay capital, she is more adept at the language of young LGB people. She has associated herself with queer cultural moments, meeting the cast of “Queer Eye”, a reality-TV show, and embracing Charli XCX’s “brat summer”. And in her personality she exhibits what Susan Sontag, an intellectual, once described as “a sensibility that revels in artifice, stylisation, theatricalisation, irony, playfulness, and exaggeration”—in a word, Ms Harris is a trifle camp.

Ironically, that definition could apply to her opponent too. But the Republican Party Mr Trump leads is toxic to many gay voters. Although Mr Trump appears uninterested in opposing gay rights—he softened the party’s opposition to same-sex marriage, for example—he has not challenged some other Republicans’ homophobia nor made any substantive appeal to LGB voters. He also trumpets a conservative line in the trans debate, placing himself at odds with many gay voters. If Ms Harris wins the election, she could have the gays to thank.■

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