Democrats are in a panic as polling data reveal their longtime efforts to paint the Republican Party as an enemy to LGBTQ Americans are quickly unraveling. Donald Trump could be on track to win more LGBTQ votes than any GOP presidential candidate in presidential history.
During the RNC last week, it became obvious that Trump’s Republican Party is willing to engage LGBTQ voters more openly than in years past.
Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel featured prominently in the GOP effort to reach out to voters in the group. During a primetime speech at the RNC, Theil delivered well-received remarks about his pride in being both gay and a Republican with the suggestion that the two not, as the Democrats want everyone to believe, mutually exclusive.
“Every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American,” he said to healthy applause from the conservative crowd.
Theil also pointed out that the Democrats’ efforts to curry favor among LGBTQ voters are little more than disingenuous distractions meant to draw attention away from the party’s failures to help all Americans in recent years.
“When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won,” he said. “Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?”
Trump didn’t deliver a full speech directly to LGBTQ voters— but he managed to reach out to the group with a remark that should be noted as one of the most powerful of this election season.
“Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Fla., 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist. This time, the terrorist targeted our LGBTQ community,” Trump said.
He added: “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.”
Without the backdrop of the Obama administration’s outright refusal to acknowledge fundamentalist Islam as a direct threat to the freedoms of all Americans, Trump’s promise of protection for LGBTQ Americans would be less significant. But while the current president has busied himself with bathroom policy and social justice talking points, Trump is promising to defeat an ideology which avows the right to execute LGBTQ people anywhere in the world. That, evidently, is a point not lost on the nation’s LGBTQ community.
Log Cabin Republicans President Gregory Angelo says that’s precisely why Trump could stand to perform well among many LGBTQ voters in the nation.
“What the Trump campaign has done at least in so far as it has engaged in LGBTQ issues, and done so explicitly, it has jettisoned a lot of the more fiery rhetoric that we see around social issues, rhetoric that in previous election cycles, even only four years ago, included the Republican Party nominee not just saying that he doesn’t support marriage equality, but going so far as to sign a pledge and saying he would support a constitutional ban on marriage equality,” Angelo said in an interview with the Washington Examiner
In other words, rather than pander to the group as a weaker class in need of federal help finding the bathroom as Democrats do or write LGTBQ Americans off as non-supporters like past Republican candidates, the Trump GOP is positioned to acknowledge freedom to alternate lifestyle choices but focus on policy that affects all Americans.
Angelo noted that his group courts many gay Republicans who are anything but single issue voters. Like other Republicans, they have concerns about terror, immigration and fiscal policy. For that reason, the Log Cabin Republicans are predicting that Trump could pull more than a third of the LGBTQ vote from the Democrats in November.
Democratic Party officials, rather than applaud what appear to be changing GOP attitudes about LGBTQ Americans, are accusing Trump of pandering.
In response, they’re doubling down on pandering to LGBTQ voters.
Roll Call reported:
Democrats are expected to call attention to their historic support for gay marriage. The Co-Chair of the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus, New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, and LGBT rights activist Sarah McBride have prime speaking spots Thursday night, the Clinton campaign announced Sunday. The 2012 Democratic convention featured three openly gay members of Congress as speakers and a record number of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender delegates hailing from all 50 states.
The party is also expected to call for more action on LGBT issues, including the passage of a civil rights bill and a rejection of laws that allow discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.
Democratic insiders are also suggesting that Clinton could pack her presidential cabinet with LGBTQ members.
While Trump’s ability to sway LGBTQ voters may have little impact on the overall outcome of the election because of the small percentage of likely voters represented by the group, it could have huge implications for the future of the GOP. In elections past, Republicans have found themselves hamstrung in broadening the party’s base, even with increasing appetites for fiscal responsibility and small government, because of the party establishment’s reluctance to drop big government attitudes with regard to morality legislation.
Trump’s apparent ability to draw support from social conservatives even as he reaches out to LGBTQ Americans suggests that his presidency could contribute to a more libertarian future for the GOP, at least on the social front.
The post Democrats aren’t happy about Trump’s LGBTQ outreach appeared first on Personal Liberty®.
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