A Buncha You Gays Voted Democrat Last Fall

In news that shouldn't be all that surprising, a lotta gays vote Democrat! And that support is, apparently, greater than ever.

Eighty-two percent of LGBTQ+ voters cast their ballots for Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterm elections, according to a recently released NBC News exit poll. This makes the queer electorate the second most reliably Democratic voting bloc identified in the poll, after Black voters at 90 percent.

The LGBTQ+ electorate has historically gravitated toward America's center-left party, thanks in no small part to the GOP's legislative antagonism against the community over the past few decades, but that support has risen since 2012 when it hovered at about 76 percent.

More queer people see themselves as Democrats these days, NBC News also found. In 2014, only 50 percent of queer people identified as Democrats. As of last November, that share had jumped to 63 percent. LGBTQ+ Republican self-identification has also dropped in that time span from 17 percent to only 10 percent.

"The [LGBTQ+] community has consistently shown strong support for the Democratic party," Gary Gates, a former research director at UCLA's Williams Institute, told NBC News.

"This isn't surprising," he continued. "The hostility of the Trump administration to LGBT issues, including the attempted ban on transgender military service and efforts to reduce or eliminate measurement of sexual orientation and gender identity on federal surveys, may mean that LGBT voters feel particularly threatened right now by the President and his party."

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