This is WESA Politics, a weekly newsletter by Chris Potter providing analysis about Pittsburgh and state politics. If you want it earlier — we'll deliver it to your inbox on Thursday afternoon — sign up here.
Lots of folks who study polls for a living are looking forward to the data we will get from surveys this fall. Susan Dicklitch-Nelson, however, doesn’t sound like one of them.
But then the Franklin & Marshall College professor focuses on the fortunes of LGBTQ people around the globe. And while the United States in particular has seen massive strides forward for the cause of equality, Dicklitch-Nelson predicts that during the next few months, “We’ll see a lot of scapegoating and family values being weaponized.”
Dicklitch-Nelson is the founder of Franklin & Marshall’s “Global Barometers” program, which monitors the status of LGBT rights around the world. The work involves surveying how legal protections vary from place to place, but it also involves consulting public opinion to see how actual lived experience jibes with protections on paper.
“You can have the best state protections, but the state won't be there walking with you down the street at night,” Dicklitch-Nelson puts it.
In a 2022 survey, the Barometer’s survey found that when asked how safe and accepted they felt, LGBTQ respondents in Pennsylvania and much of the rest of the United States gave responses that were fair to middling.
Arguably, just getting to “meh” is a historic political triumph. A dozen years ago, even Barack Obama professed to oppose marriage rights for same-sex couples. But even with the improvements since then, there are notable variations in how survey respondents say they feel now. Older LGBTQ respondents tend to be more optimistic than young ones, the perspectives of whites were sunnier than those of Black respondents, and people who identified as transgender or nonbinary voiced deeper misgivings than other community members.
And with the election, Dicklitch-Nelson worries, "It's going to get worse.” She has another national survey planned to run from August through November, and because of the political rhetoric, she predicts “I fully anticipate the United States will score much lower” in terms of how LGBTQ Americans perceive their well being.
In fact, the political climate may already be taking a toll.
A national poll conducted this spring by LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD found that over 90% of LGBTQ voters were motivated to vote this November. Not surprisingly, they favored President Joe Biden over Republican Donald Trump by a margin of 68 to 15, and support for Democrats in Congress was even higher. But despite the professed enthusiasm, nearly three-quarters of LGBTQ respondents said they felt the current political discourse had undermined their emotional or mental well-being; nearly half said they could tie it to a personal experience of harassment or bullying.
We’ve already heard radio ads attacking trans people on local airwaves, placed by an advocacy group led by Trump ally Stephen Miller. And just this week, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick joined a “fireside chat” held by Moms for Liberty, a group that has opposed school policies that seek to accommodate trans students.
As for Trump himself, in the past he’s said he is “fine” with same-sex marriage and opposed an anti-trans bathroom law in North Carolina during a spat with 2016 rival Ted Cruz. When he accepted his party’s presidential nomination that year, he pledged to “do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens” — and thanked the audience for cheering.
Back in those days, though, Trump was seeking to drum up opposition to a common enemy: terrorism committed by Islamic extremists and what he called their “hateful foreign ideology.” These days, he’s much more likely to depict support for transgender people as a foreign ideology in itself, by likening gender-affirming care for children as “child abuse,” for example, and pledging to roll back anti-discrimination protections.
Whatever role such messages play in the stump speeches and campaign ads to come, the issue likely won't go away after November. It was just last year, after all, that the U.S. Supreme Court sided with a Christian graphic designer who didn’t want to serve same-sex couples. The ruling’s impact was limited, but ask abortion-rights advocates what a new Supreme Court appointment or two could do to expand it.
And a recent report by the conservative Institute for Legislative Analysis — which compiles voting records in Congress and state legislatures — found that based on recent patterns, the GOP is “moving away from its focus on tax and fiscal conservatism and instead prioritizing cultural and social policy.”
A decade ago, the GOP’s animating force was the “Tea Party” movement and its belief in freeing up markets and constricting government spending. But the ILA found that Trump-era populism, with its emphasis on tariffs and willingness to run up big deficits, has left Republicans much less united on economic questions — even as they’ve consolidated around what the ILA calls “culture war” issues.
ILA president Fred McGrath notes that FreedomWorks, a think tank that provided institutional support for the Tea Party movement a dozen years ago, recently shut down amid financial woes. Some of its influence, he said, has migrated to groups with an avowedly conservative Christian mindset, such as Center for Renewing America.
“There is a focus on Trump, and he is very much the leader of the party,” McGrath told me. “But the grassroots and the base have changed substantially. And when you have that grassroots element, those are the ones calling Congress to vote.”
Meanwhile, Dicklitch-Nelson sees this as a “dangerous” moment for LGBTQ Americans and those who support them.
“For many years there was a sense of their being an arc of progress, and it seems like things will keep going up and up,” she said. “But sometimes with higher visibility comes more backlash.”
