Gay voters are smitten with Kamala Harris

Republicans are uninterested in, or hostile to, a growing voter bloc
共和党人对不断壮大的选民群体不感兴趣或怀有敌意

2024年10月24日 05:34 上午

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.

在乔·拜登总统宣布退出选举后几天，一段 2013 年的短片在推特上疯传。视频显示，当时的加州总检察长在电话中对洛杉矶县书记官说：“我是卡玛拉·哈里斯——你必须立即开始结婚。”最高法院刚刚驳回了同性婚姻反对者提起的诉讼，哈里斯女士正在指示职员开始工作。

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.

该视频引起了推特用户的共鸣，庆祝现任副总统将获得民主党提名。民意调查显示，女同性恋、男同性恋和双性恋选民在接下来的几周内转向支持哈里斯女士，帮助她有望登上总统宝座（无法获得跨性别选民的数据）。但尽管大肆宣传，两位主要政党的提名人都没有花太多时间来讨好同性恋选民。无论如何，LGB 人似乎都喜欢哈里斯女士。她在共和党内的对手要么对从不断壮大的集团中吸引选民不感兴趣，要么怀有敌意。

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 chart 2).

在《经济学人》对投票行为的大样本分析中，我们发现，在其他条件相同的情况下，同性恋身份对选民对哈里斯女士的支持度的影响排名第三，仅次于黑人或无神论者（见图 1）。他们对民主党的依恋由来已久，反映出该党与酷儿激进主义的历史联系，但这并不意味着对民主党提名人的支持是有保证的。2024 年，随着拜登的候选资格逐渐消退，YouGov 的民意调查显示，男女同性恋和双性恋选民对拜登的支持率从 71% 左右下降至 64%（见图 2）。

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.

哈里斯女士参加选举激励了这个群体。在她参选的头几周，她在 LGB 选民中的得票率跃升了 14 个百分点，而在异性恋选民中的得票率仅增加了 3 个百分点。根据 YouGov 的数据，今年夏天哈里斯女士的民意调查激增是由同性恋选民推动的。此后，这一差距略有缩小，但她在同性恋和双性恋选民中仍然保持着稳固的领先地位。尽管该群体在 YouGov 受访者中所占比例不到 9%，但哈里斯女士在其中 61 个百分点的领先优势足以弥补她在异性恋选民中的 4 个百分点的差距。

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.

尽管哈里斯的竞选活动在同性恋问题上相对安静，但 LGB 选民对哈里斯的支持压倒性的。民主党的政纲包括禁止歧视的承诺，就像 2020 年那样，但她在竞选演讲中并不经常提及同性恋者。她也不经常宣扬拜登政府的成就，例如为同性婚姻提供联邦保护。

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.

与拜登相比，哈里斯女士的部分吸引力在于，她来自同性恋之都旧金山，更擅长年轻的同性恋者的语言。她将自己与酷儿文化时刻联系在一起，会见了电视真人秀《粉雄救兵》的演员，并拥抱了 Charli XCX 的“小子夏天”。在她的个性中，她展现了知识分子苏珊·桑塔格(Susan Sontag)曾经描述的“一种陶醉于技巧、风格化、戏剧化、讽刺、俏皮和夸张的情感”——总而言之，哈里斯女士是一个小派。

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.■

讽刺的是，这个定义也适用于她的对手。但特朗普领导的共和党对许多同性恋选民来说是有毒的。尽管特朗普似乎对反对同性恋权利不感兴趣——例如，他软化了该党对同性婚姻的反对态度——但他没有挑战其他一些共和党人的同性恋恐惧症，也没有对同性恋选民提出任何实质性的呼吁。他还在跨性别辩论中宣扬保守路线，这使自己与许多同性恋选民产生了分歧。如果哈里斯女士赢得选举，她应该感谢同性恋者。■