With just 32 days until the 2020 election, the Trump campaign has increasingly attempted to tout the incumbent’s alleged support among LGBTQ+ voters. Just this week, the president’s middle son, Eric Trump, accidentally claimed to be “part of that community” while claiming that queer and transgender people “come out for my father, every single day.”
That claim — that LGBTQ+ people love Trump — appeared to be backed up by a poll conducted by the gay dating app Hornet earlier this month showing that 45% of gay men plan to vote for him in the presidential race. Trump, as is his wont, retweeted the survey and added, “Great!”
But the president shouldn’t get too excited: While the Hornet poll was immediately condemned as “clickbaity, sloppy journalism,” a new survey shows that Trump has historically low support among LGBTQ+ people. A poll of 800 voters conducted by the national nonprofit GLAAD and Pathfinder Opinion Research found that just 17 percent of LGBTQ+ respondents intend to cast their ballot for Trump.
In contrast, an overwhelming 75 percent of LGBTQ+ voters expressed support for Democratic challenger Joe Biden — marking a 58-point gap between the candidates. Just five percent of respondents intend to back a third-party candidate, and only two percent aren’t sure of their votes.
Those numbers might reaffirm preexisting assumptions about the LGBTQ+ community’s political leanings, given the widespread belief that queer and transgender people are Democratic stalwarts. But that’s not exactly true: When LGBT voters were credited with Barack Obama’s bigger-than-expected win against Mitt Romney in 2012, Gallup found that registration was fairly split between Democrats and Independents: 44% to 43%. Just 13% were registered Republicans.
Even with the low number of out-and-proud conservatives, previous Republican nominees have significantly outperformed Trump when it comes to pulling in the LGBTQ+ vote. When John McCain lost to Obama in 2008, a surprising high share of LGBTQ+ people who cast a ballot in the election supported his ticket: 27% percent. While Romney lost a large share of that group four years later, he still did better than Trump’s recent numbers, finishing with 22% of the LGBTQ+ vote.
The only Republican nominee in recent years to poll as badly as Trump with the LGBTQ+ community is, well, himself. When he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, only 14 percent of queer and transgender people who turned out to the polls voted for him.
While Trump might attempt to spin the slight uptick in LGBTQ+ support between 2016 and 2012 as a moral victory, he really shouldn’t. The survey’s margin of error is 3.5 percentage points, meaning that the 3-point difference between then and now could simply be a polling mistake. Given the president’s repeated attacks on the LGBTQ+ community — whether it’s in healthcare, military service, school sports, or access to homeless shelters — that’s not hard to imagine.
Here’s some advice for the Trump campaign: The next time they want to use a shoddy, poorly sourced poll or a sham homosexuality decriminalization initiative to pretend LGBTQ+ people have anything but disdain for the president, save the energy. With Trump trailing Biden by an average of 7.9 points in nationwide polls after failing to condemn white supremacists, he’ll need it.
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