'Rainbow wave' of LGBTQ candidates run and win in 2020 election
来源:The Conversation
更新:2020-11-04 09:16:38 作者:Timothy R. Bussey
More LGBTQ candidates ran for office in the United States in 2020 than ever before – at least 1,006. That’s a 41% increase over the 2018 midterms, according to the LGBTQ Victory Fund.
While an estimated 5% of the U.S. population identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer, just 0.17% of elected officials across all levels of the American government are LGBTQ.
Marriage equality, too, may be under threat. In early October, Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito suggested that the 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which made same-sex marriage legal across the United States, should be overturned.
In short, candidates and LGBTQ rights were both on the ballot in the 2020 election, either explicitly or implicitly. While many questions remain undecided at press time, here’s the takeaway from four down-ballot races I’ve been following as a scholar of LGBTQ politics.
At the start of this election cycle, only three U.S. states – Hawaii, South Dakota and Mississippi – had no openly LGBTQ elected officials at any level of government. This year, candidates in Hawaii and South Dakota hoped to get their states off that list.
A political newcomer, Loeffler was appointed to her seat by Gov. Brian Kemp in late 2019 following the retirement of longtime Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson. Neither Loeffler nor her top opponent in the jungle primary, Democratic contender the Rev. Raphael Warnock, received over 50% of the vote, so a runoff election will be held in the coming weeks.
This runoff will be significant for the LGBTQ community because of Loeffler’s recent sponsorship of a Senate bill to ban transgender girls from playing school sports.
Warnock, a pastor at Georgia’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, has made a strong public commitment to LGBTQ rights and condemned Loeffler’s legislation, saying in an interview with the LGBTQ outlet Project Q that “no one is free until we are all free.”
In the same interview, Warnock expressed his support for the Equality Act, proposed legislation that would add LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections into federal law.
LGBTQ Americans vote heavily Democratic. In 2008, John McCain won 27% of the LGBTQ vote while running for president against Barack Obama. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 22% of the LGBTQ vote. And in 2016, nationwide exit poll data of LGBTQ voters shows that Donald Trump received roughly 14% of the LGBTQ vote.
Harvey Milk, the late San Francisco city councilman, is often incorrectly cited as the first openly LGBTQ elected official. That pioneer was actually Kathy Kozachenko, who at age 21 won a seat on the Ann Arbor City Council in Michigan in 1974.