Repeat off

1

Repeat one

all

Repeat all

Swing voters went for Donald Trump because of trans rights issues, poll finds
November 20 2024, 08:15

A poll conducted in the 48 hours that followed Election Day earlier this month found that voters who were undecided during the race before making up their minds in the final weeks of the campaign voted for Donald Trump by a 52-38 margin. And the survey points to the importance of trans rights issues in these voters’ decision-making.

Of the swing voters who voted for Trump, 83% said that they believe Kamala Harris supported “using taxpayer dollars to pay for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants in prison,” according to the survey conducted by Blueprint. This is not a position that she campaigned on and is, in fact, a description of rights already accorded to people in federal custody under the Eighth Amendment, rights that were in place during Trump’s first term.

Related

Fact Check: Did Sen. Tammy Baldwin fund an org that pushed an “aggressive LGBTQ agenda on kids”?
Republicans are claiming that Tammy Baldwin is trying to make gender-affirming surgery legal for kids. What’s the truth?

Among swing voters who voted for Harris, only 40% believed that Harris supported that policy.

Insights for the LGBTQ+ community

Subscribe to our briefing for insights into how politics impacts the LGBTQ+ community and more.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

A large majority – 77% – of swing voters who voted for Trump believed that Harris supported “allowing children under 18 to transition genders without informing their parents,” which is never something Harris said she supported. Only 29% of swing voters who voted for Harris believed the same thing.

Other Republican lies were also believed by large swathes of swing voters who voted for Trump. 82% believed that Harris wanted to ban gas-powered vehicles by the year 2035, which is not true, and 76% believed that Harris wanted to allow abortion up until the day of birth, which is also not true. 67% believe that Harris wanted to give Black people reparations for slavery, 74% said they believed Harris would ban fracking (something she faced criticism for explicitly opposing), and 73% said that she would force everyone onto a single-payer health care system.

Swing voters who voted for Harris were less likely to believe she supported any of these positions.

Graph of results from the Blueprint poll
| Blueprint

While Harris didn’t support most of the positions raised in the poll, Trump was effective at getting swing voters to believe that she did. He repeatedly said that children were getting gender-affirming surgery at school without their parents’ knowledge, which is a lie, and his campaign spent tens of millions on ads that made it seem like support for “taxpayer-funded sex changes” for prisoners and immigrants was a central part of her campaign and not just a statement of how she implemented a policy when she was district attorney in San Francisco.

In Michigan, the Trump campaign ran ads saying that Harris “wants to end all gas-powered cars. Crazy, but true,” even though that’s not true. The statement about reparations comes from a social media meme that took liberties with an interview where Harris said that she supports Congress’ efforts to study the issue of reparations, not that she would unilaterally implement them as president.

The aftermath of the 2024 elections has shown the role that misinformation played in people’s decisions on who to vote for, like fake images of Harris in a swimsuit hugging sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, rumors that immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Ohio, an AI-generated video of a man claiming he was molested by Harris’ running mate Tim Walz, and false statements from Republicans that the Biden administration wasn’t helping people affected by Hurricane Helene.

One fake video of a “Haitian” man showed him saying that he had voted twice in two different counties in Georgia, and it was later uncovered to be a video made by “Russian influence actors.”

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.


Comments (0)