A new poll of
lesbian, gay, and bisexual voters, conducted by Hunter
College, has found that 63% of LGB likely voters in the
Democratic primaries say they will support Sen.
Hillary Clinton, while 22% are backing Sen. Barack
Obama, and 7% will vote for John Edwards.
The poll also
found that about 75% of the respondents said they are
likely to vote in the primaries, suggesting that LGB voters
are much more politically involved than the general
population.
"That's an unusually high percentage,
it's just huge," Hunter College
professor Kenneth Sherrill, one of the study's
investigators, told The Advocate. "You rarely
find such a high percentage of people saying
they're likely to vote in the primaries -- only
the most politicized groups in the population will do
that."
Sherrill said
reading the data really drove home the fact that, in some
senses, LGB people are "model citizens."
"They're more active in community
organizations, more likely to have communicated with
elected officials, and more active in the communities
they live in, not just LGBT organizations," Sherrill
said.
Other key
findings of the poll included:
-90% of
LGB likely voters said they would vote in the Democratic
primaries and 21% say that lesbian and gay rights will be
the most important issue influencing their vote in
2008.
-72% of
LGB likely voters consider Senator Clinton a supporter of
gay rights, with Senator Obama at 52% and former
senator Edwards at 41%. On the Republican side,
former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was at 37%,
followed by Sen. John McCain at 13%.
-33% of
all respondents say they are "very interested"
in politics, compared with 22% of the general
population sample. And 36% said they became more
interested in politics during their
"coming-out" period.
-When
asked about the proposed federal law making it illegal to
discriminate against lesbians, gays, and bisexuals in
employment, a majority of LGB people (by a margin of
60% to 37%) said that those seeking to pass the law
were wrong to remove protections for transgender
people in order to get the votes necessary for passage in
Congress.
-Asked
what gay rights goals are "extremely
important," respondents said:
Enacting
employment nondiscrimination laws: 59%
Protections from
bias crimes: 59%
Securing spousal
benefits: 58%
AIDS funding:
53%
Legalizing
same-sex marriage: 50%
Rights of
transgender people: 36%
Ending the
military's ban on being openly gay: 36%
The Hunter
College poll was conducted with 768 respondents by Knowledge
Networks Inc. from November 15 through November 26. The
survey was conducted among those who identified
themselves as lesbian, gay, or bisexual to Knowledge
Networks, which recruits its nationally representative
sample of respondents by telephone and administers surveys
to them via the Internet. The survey has a margin of error
of plus or minus four percentage points. The poll was
funded by a grant from the Human Rights Campaign
Foundation. (The Advocate)
