The Equality Forum released a study that “suggests that gay and lesbian voters voted as a block in the recent mayoral primary election in Philadelphia and that gay and lesbian voters were markedly more likely to support their candidate than their neighbors.”

The study doesn’t try find the causes of the gay voting block, only notes the effect. I suppose two theories could be that either the gay community found one candidate more “gay friendly” than the others or simply that members of the gay community had similar political interests in mind that were more strongly supported by one candidate than the others. A third explanation might be that the study used “gay neighborhoods” as the source of their voting data, and the issues in the Philly mayor’s election may have had a particularly strong effect on those neighborhoods.

Regardless of the cause, the effect remains that the gay neighborhoods all voted very strongly for one candidate. Bear in mind this was a Democratic primary – this wasn’t a liberal Democrat against a conservative Republican. These were all Democrats.

This is an isolated study done with some very high level data, but it would probably do politicians and their strategic advisors some good to dig a little deeper to find the cause.

The study can be found here:

http://www.equalityforum.com/press/GLvoters-FinalReport.pdf

This entry is filed under GLBT, multicultural, politics, research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.