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2 See How They Run: Voter Preferences and Candidates’ Experiences with the Role of Sexual Orientation in State Elections
- Georgetown University Press
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C H A P T E R T W O See How They Run: Voter Preferences and Candidates’ Experiences with the Role of Sexual Orientation in State Elections What I think it signifies for the state is that this is a fairly tolerant state and that voters are making decisions on people’s character, and not their sexual orientation. —Washington gay senator Ed Murray in response to a question on the large number of LGBT legislators in the state Like other groups, the LGBT community can try to achieve political representation by electing openly LGBT candidates to public office, ensuring that LGBT people are appointed to official positions, or by influencing the behavior of sympathetic heterosexual and closeted homosexual officials. However, as with any other career, LGBT persons seeking public office are often hesitant to be open or public about their sexual orientation. For LGBT public officials, being out means publicly stating one’s sexual or gender orientation. But being out for officials may also mean discrimination, a lack of public support, or even the threat of physical violence. Even so, overall opposition to LGBT people, LGBT equality, and LGBT public officials appears to be declining by significant margins. This chapter examines the role that a candidate’s sexual orientation plays in an election by focusing largely on public support for LGBT candidates in state-level elections. My analysis proceeds in two parts. First, I provide an overview of public attitudes about LGBT candidates and explore the individual-level characteristics associated with opposition to LGBT candidates for state office. Second, I shift to the perspective of LGBT candidates for state legislative office. I analyze the survey and interview responses about LGBT candidates who ran for state legislative seats between 2003 and 2004. Finally, I summarize the results of my analysis and draw conclusions about the role of a candidate’s sexual orientation. 33 34 CHAPTER TWO An Overview of LGBT Candidates and Public Opinion To assess the importance of a candidate’s sexual orientation, we need to start with the basic facts. Although more than 730 LGBT officials held public offices in 2009, from local sheriff to the U.S. Congress, this is still a tiny fraction of all officeholders in the country. Yet, following the 2008 elections, only three states had no LGBT elected official at any level and only twenty states had no LGBT state legislators. LGBT elected officials have certainly increased, from less than 20 for all the years before 1991, to 78 in 2009 (of 7,382 seats), but there are clearly very few. Even if the low estimates of LGBT people in the population are correct (about 3 percent), the LGBT community would have to increase the number of LGBT officials in all offices by more than 500 percent simply to approach matching descriptive representation in offices with representation in the population. However, this is not to say that the low numbers of LGBT officials simply reflect a lack of public support for LGBT candidates. Indeed, women, African Americans, and Hispanics are not represented in elected offices to the same degree that they are represented in the population anywhere in the country. As chapter 1 suggests, the lack of representation for LGBT people, women, and ethnic and racial minorities likely reflects the limited pool of candidates from these communities as much as it reflects any aversion in the population toward these groups. With that said, it is quite clear that as a group, LGBT Americans are not viewed in a positive manner by many people. As chapter 1 makes clear, although affect toward gays and lesbians has ‘‘warmed’’ over time, the mean scores suggest that most Americans have an unfavorable or cool affect. Indeed, from 1984 to 1996 gays and lesbians scored lower than any other group except illegal immigrants, and in 2008 they scored lower than all but three groups (see figure 1.4 in chapter 1). And although supermajorities now support antidiscrimination and hate crimes laws for LGBT people, 15 to 30 percent of adults still oppose these laws, which simply suggests that a portion of the public is unlikely to find an LGBT candidate acceptable. Nearly all previous research on the impact of a candidate’s sexual orientation on voter evaluations, candidate success, or the candidate’s electoral margins has been conducted through experiments in which voters (usually college students) evaluated fictional candidates (see Golebiowska 2001; Golebiowska and Thomsen 1999; Herrick and Thomas 1999). One exception is Golebiowska...