Hillary Clinton and the Gay Vote

Why don't exit polls track the preference of gay voters outside California and New York? Chris Crain is concerned gay urbanites in liberal states are being used as a stand-in for the national "gay vote," which might be a little more complicated:

While gay voters in places like New York and San Francisco may feel the luxury of looking past gay issues in the Democratic primary, those issues hit much closer to home in those states that lack any state or local anti-discrimination laws and where anti-gay bias is a more common occurrence.

I certainly don't feel that luxury. I know what life is like for gays who live in my native South, and I've seen firsthand how the issue can rip apart families and friendships. And laws like the Defense of Marriage Act have a direct impact on my life, since my partner and I cannot live together in the U.S. because of it. It makes a real difference to me that Barack Obama favors full repeal of DOMA and Hillary only half, and because she has consistently tried to defend the nefarious law signed by her husband in 1996.

Exit polling of gays is rarely done outside of New York and California because the sample is presumed too small. As a result, we get a skewed look at what GLB voters really think about these candidates.

Crain is an Obama supporter, so a slight bias is clear. But it's an interesting point. Now, I'm not sure that gay voters all around the country aren't also flocking to Clinton over Obama. The only gay southerner on my Facebook friends list happens to be a Clinton supporter himself, so based on that scientific methodology, maybe there's just something appealing to gay voters about Clinton. But, as is the case with so many other things, we'd simply never know based on the polls that are out there. So we are just left to assume Clinton has the gay vote to herself.

Comments

[libhomo]

The Clinton campaign has tried to assert that the lgbt vote is disproportionately in her favor even though the percentages are within the margins of error for the polls.

Considering how homophobic Bill Clinton was, I'm amazed that any other lgbt person is voting for any Clinton.

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