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 National
Gay Survey Shows Clinton With Commanding Lead
by 365Gay.com Newscenter Staff
Posted: November 29, 2007 - 11:00 am ET
(New York City) A new poll of
gay prospective voters shows that Sen. Hillary Clinton has a
huge lead over her other Democratic opponents for the party
nomination.
The Hunter College survey is
the first ever conducted by a university-based team of
scholars with a nationally representative sample of lesbian,
gay and bisexual Americans.
The poll found Clinton with 63
percent of LGB likely voters. She was followed by
Senator Barack Obama with 22 percent and John Edwards with 7
percent.
The survey was conducted with 768 respondents by
Knowledge Networks, Inc. from November 15 through November 26.
It also found that during the
process of "coming out," LGBs become more liberal
and more engaged in the political process than the general
population.
"We found a stunning
transformation in political views in the LGB community of a
magnitude that is virtually unparalleled among social
groupings in the U.S. population,” said political science
professor Kenneth Sherrill of Hunter College, one of the
study’s investigators.
The survey found that nine in
10 gay and bi likely voters will vote in the Democratic
primaries and 21 percent say that lesbian and gay rights will
be the most important issue influencing their vote in 2008.
Seventy-two percent of LGB
likely voters consider Senator Clinton a supporter of gay
rights, with Senator Obama at 52 percent and former Senator
Edwards at 41 percent.
On the Republican side, former
New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was at 37 percent, followed
by Senator John McCain at 13 percent.
"These findings suggest
opportunities," said Murray Edelman, a distinguished
scholar at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute and one
of the study’s investigators.
"Clinton benefits from a
high turnout in this very Democratic bloc; her opponents would
benefit from making their stated support for gay rights more
visible to LGB voters."
A third - 33 percent - of all
respondents say they are “very interested” in politics
compared to 22 percent of the Knowledge Networks general
population sample. And 36 percent said they became more
interested in politics during their “coming out” period.
LGBs were more likely than the
general population to have contacted a government official in
the past 12 months (23 percent to 16 percent).
"These levels of civic
engagement indicate that gay people can have a bigger
influence on public policy than suggested by their relatively
small share of the population,” said Patrick J. Egan, an
assistant professor at New York University and another of the
study’s investigators.
When asked about the proposed
federal law making it illegal to discriminate against
lesbians, gays, and bisexuals in employment, LGBs (by a margin
of 60 to 37 percent) said that those seeking to pass the law
were wrong to remove protections for transgendered people in
order to get the votes necessary for passage in Congress.
The poll was funded by a
grant from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.
Sole control over the design of
the study’s questionnaire and analysis of the data were
maintained by the study’s investigators. The survey
was conducted among those who identified themselves as
lesbian, gay or bisexual to Knowledge Networks, which recruits
its nationally representative sample of respondents by
telephone and administers surveys to them via the Internet.
The survey has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 4 percentage
points.
©365Gay.com 2007
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