Democrats Won’t Win by Abandoning LGBTQ+ Equality. They Win When They Fight Back.
When Democrats Fight for LGBTQ+ Equality, They Win. Abandoning the LGBTQ+ Community Isn’t a Winning Strategy for Democrats
A mass delusion is sweeping America: namely, that the reason Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election was that the party too vocally supported LGBTQ+ equality.
A new report touted by The Welcome Party, a centrist political action committee turned nonprofit, finds that 70% of voters believe that the Democratic Party overemphasizes issues like “protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans” and “fighting climate change” in its messaging. Deeming Democrats to be “out of touch” with the average voter, its polling research stresses that the party should instead focus on issues like “securing the border” or “lowering the rate of crime.” According to Semafor, The Welcome Party intends to present its findings directly to elected Democrats in the coming weeks.
As Democrats continue to wring their hands over U.S. President Donald Trump’s second victory this past November, the too-online have predictably seized upon the report to heap misdirected blame on LGBTQ+ Americans. Frequent poster Joe Walsh, a former Republican Congressman who recently converted to the Democratic Party, posted on BlueSky that anyone who was on the ground last year “speaking with middle class/working class voters… heard from these voters every single day the same.” Stephen Richer, a fellow at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, concurred that the report is simply common sense: “Anyone outside of a college cafeteria could have told.”
The trouble with common sense, however, is that sense is increasingly uncommon. If anything, the above research indicates that the U.S. public has short memories: Democrats did perilously little to engage LGBTQ+ equality in the 2024 presidential election, thereby ceding the issue to the right. The last time that Democrats made full rights and protections for the LGBTQ+ community a centerpiece of their messaging, they won the White House resoundingly.
If 2020 now seems a lifetime away, so do its politics. More than two dozen Democrats ran for president at the time, making it the largest Democratic field in at least four decades and the most diverse in history. After four years of Trump decimating LGBTQ+ rights under his first term, nearly every mainstream candidate spoke to their stance on equality. Democratic hopefuls like former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, and former South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg (himself an out gay man) released detailed platforms outlining how they would fight for the LGBTQ+ community as president.
Let’s take a closer look at some of those platforms. New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand promised to cover gender-affirming treatments under a universal health care plan. Former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke pledged to appoint more LGBTQ+ allies in the federal government and ensure that data collection on sexual orientation and gender identity is included in the U.S. Census. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren released a comprehensive 12-page plan vowing to ban discrimination against queer couples seeking to foster or adopt, institute a nationwide conversion therapy ban, decriminalize HIV transmission, and ease the asylum process for LGBTQ+ immigrants fleeing to the U.S. for safety.
As the deputy editor for Out magazine during the Democratic primaries, I worked directly with several of the 2020 presidential campaigns to ensure that LGBTQ+ prospective voters knew where they stood. To name just a few, our staff coordinated op-eds with the teams for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and former Vice President Joe Biden (who would eventually win the nomination) that highlighted the candidates’ records on LGBTQ+ issues and what they hoped to achieve in office.
“Bernie is committed to guaranteeing comprehensive, free at point-of-service health care to everyone,” wrote Victoria Rodriguez-Roldan, then a national surrogate for Sanders’ campaign. “His Medicare for All plan would not only confront the massive health disparities faced by the LGBTQ+ community, it would cover gender affirming surgeries, increase access to PrEP, remove barriers to mental health care, and bolster suicide prevention efforts.”
Candidates had the opportunity to speak to queer voters in their own words at not one but two dedicated LGBTQ+ forums. At an October 2019 town hall organized by GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Klobuchar called to recognize a third gender on federal documents, and Booker declared violence against the LGBTQ+ community to be a “national emergency.” Warren apologized for a 2012 remark in which she claimed that providing gender-affirming care to trans people in prison isn’t a “good use of taxpayer dollars.” Prior to a frankly surreal non-sequitur on “round-the-clock gay sex” in San Francisco, Biden waxed about how far society has progressed on LGBTQ+ acceptance in recent decades: “It’s normalized. It’s not anything strange.”
Supporting LGBTQ+ people wasn’t what won Democrats the 2020 election all on its own, but being vocal allies to the community certainly didn’t hurt. In defeating Trump in the November general election by 4.5%, Biden earned not merely the largest number of votes from any presidential candidate in history but also record support from the queer community. In an HRC poll, 83% of LGBTQ+ respondents said they backed Biden in 2020, a significant 5% increase from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s numbers four years earlier.
That picture is the near mirror image of 2024, when Democrats were notably silent on the major issues affecting queer Americans. After Biden withdrew from the race, former Vice President Kamala Harris declined to release a detailed policy outlining her vision for LGBTQ+ equality. Her presidential campaign platform devoted just three sentences to the LGBTQ+ community and did not mention trans people. Her only explicit action item was supporting passage of the Equality Act, a landmark civil rights bill that would enshrine LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination in all areas of public life, including housing, health care, education, and credit.
When contacted by this writer in September 2024 to expand on her platform, a representative for Harris’s team offered no additional clarification on how she would fight for equality as president. While reaffirming her support for the LGBTQ+ community, the email notably did not reference a single piece of proposed policy.
“Vice President Harris knows that freedom is the very foundation that our country was built on,” a Harris spokesperson wrote. “She’s spent her entire career fighting to make sure every single one of us has the freedom to love who we love and be who we are. From attacking LGBTQ+ rights to spewing hatred about the LGBTQ+ community, Donald Trump has made clear that he stands firmly against the fundamental freedoms that unite us. Americans deserve a President who will fight for their freedoms — not against them — and that leader is Kamala Harris.”
The contrast with 2020 is stark: Four years earlier, Harris had released one of the most expansive and wide-ranging pro-LGBTQ+ platforms of any candidate in the Democratic primaries. Among other policies, it included pledges to require insurance providers to cover HIV-prevention medications like PrEP, reverse Trump’s ban on open trans military service, appoint a White House Chief Advocate for LGBTQ+ Affairs, and prohibit “religious freedom” laws from being used to deny goods and services to LGBTQ+ people on the basis of faith. Her platform also promised to create a first-of-its-kind “transgender fellowship” in the White House that would “help lift up promising young leaders within the transgender community.”
Rather than continuing to sell the ideal of an America that uplifts and protects its LGBTQ+ citizens, Harris allowed Trump to dominate the conversation, likely in fear of alienating the same moderates that some insist Democrats don’t pander to enough. That strategy did not work. One of the most consequential moments of the 2024 presidential race was a multi-million-dollar ad campaign painting her, in now familiar fashion, as an out-of-touch liberal: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” The commercial reportedly ran more than 55,000 times in a two-week span, often during NFL games.
While Harris dismissed the ads as a distraction, her milquetoast response ignores that the blitz was actually fundamental to Trump’s plan, which was to fill the vacuum she had created on LGBTQ+ issues with fear, disinformation, and total lies. Without a clear message to combat the commercials or a proactive agenda for equality, taking the low road was what stuck in voters’ minds. Ultimately, it won the day.
Showing Democrats have learned nothing, Harris has suggested her real mistake was not that she did very little to speak to a sizable base of the Democratic Party — one totalling 9.1% of Americans — but that she should have thrown trans people under the bus more forcefully. After losing the November election by 86 electoral college points, Harris expressed regret in her new book, 107 Days, that she wasn’t more critical of policies allowing trans athletes to compete in alignment with their gender. “I agree with the concerns expressed by parents and players that we have to take into account biological factors such as muscle mass and unfair student athletic advantage when we determine who plays on which teams, especially in contact sports,” Harris wrote.
Imagine the difference if, rather than running scared from LGBTQ+ equality, Democrats actually held firm to their principles. Imagine if they fought as fiercely for queer people as Trump is fighting to eradicate the community. There’s a long-held idea in psychology that it takes three positive messages to outweigh one negative message, and so if Democrat leaders hope to counterbalance the hate, they need to not only be louder; they need to be much, much louder. Many have instead chosen silence, allowing the far-right to portray them as obsessed with LGBTQ+ rights even when they have abandoned the topic.
As party leaders grapple with their own enthusiasm problem, it’s telling to consider the grassroots support behind 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee who looks likely to sail to victory in New York’s closely watched mayoral race. While it’s difficult to name a single policy that Harris put forward in 2024, three that Mamdani has backed come to mind immediately: universal rent freezes for tenants, no-cost childcare, and a $65 million investment in trans health care. Even after the latter proposal generated bizarre, unfounded fears that Mamdani would institute “trans sharia” as mayor, the New York assemblyman stuck to his guns. During LGBTQ+ History Month, he released an ad celebrating trans civil rights leaders Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson.
If Democrats want to address the mistakes of the past, the time is not to heed centrists who tell them that the only way forward is to further water down and dilute their values. It’s time to stand for something, or else they stand for nothing at all. When a sweeping anti-trans medical care ban crossed the desk of Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear in 2023, he swiftly vetoed it. Despite presiding over one of America’s reddest states, the Democratic leader did not hide from his vote, instead responding via public statement: “My faith teaches me that all children are children of God.” Less than a year later, Beshear won reelection by five points.
 | A guest post by
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The contrast between Castro's comprehensive LGBTQ+ platform in 2020 and Harris's three-sentence mention in 2024 perfectly captures what went wrong. Castro understood that detailed policy isn't pandering, its governance. His platform showed he'd actually thought through the material conditions affecting LGBTQ+ people, from housing discrimination to HIV prevention. When Harris retreated to vague platitudes about 'freedom,' she handed Trump the ability to define her position through attack ads. The 'Kamala is for they/them' campaign only worked because she created a vaccuum where her actual policies should have been. Castro proved in 2020 that you can have both substance and electoral viability, but only if you're willing to fight for your positions rather than apologize for them. Democrats lost because they ran like cowards, not becuase they supported equality too much.