According to exit polls, LGBTQ+ voters, who accounted for 8% of all those who cast ballots, favored Vice President Kamala Harris over President-elect Donald Trump by 86% to 12% in the 2024 presidential election.
To help unpack the election results, the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, a leading research center on sexual orientation and gender identity, hosted a webinar exploring how laws and policies related to the LGBTQ+ community may fare under the incoming Trump administration.
The Nov. 15 event, “The 2024 Election: The Future of Democracy and LGBTQ Rights,” featured the institute’s federal policy director Elana Redfield, faculty director Cary Franklin and visiting scholar Andrew Flores. They were joined by former Oklahoma state Rep. Mauree Turner, New Hampshire state Rep. Alissandra Rodriguez Murray and former candidate for Wisconsin Senate Andi Rich.
Click the play button above to watch the Williams Institute’s webinar in its entirety.
Maintaining hope and staying engaged
Turner, the first nonbinary person elected to a state-level position in U.S. history, said they were not surprised by the outcome of the election but were not disillusioned, given their lived experience. “You can prepare as best you can. We all need time to rest and reflect and move through this in the ways that work for us,” they said.
Other panelists emphasized the difficult job of exploring and understanding the outcome without becoming hopeless. “Being real to the community about what’s going to happen, but also not trying to cause so much alarm and panic, is hard to balance,” said Rodriguez Murray, who identifies as queer and nonbinary.
Flores said he believed the election results were more a rejection of Democrats than an affirmation of Trump. Voters, he said, were willing to overlook potential threats to the LGBTQ+ community because they were swayed by Trump’s “antiestablishment and authentic” outsider persona and a belief that a Trump administration would improve their financial circumstances.
Turner, whose state, Oklahoma, includes progressive rural communities, emphasized the importance of maintaining solidarity and learning from each other in the election’s aftermath. “Policies are not the only things that save us. We save us,” they said.
Rich, who campaigned for the Wisconsin Senate in a historically red district, agreed and stressed that people should be aware of what’s happening in their hometowns and states and remain actively involved. “Stay focused on your local issues, your local races, and what you can do locally,” she said. “It really is going to be the difference-maker for protecting your neighbors, yourselves and the people we truly care about.”
What is Project 2025 and what could it mean for the LGBTQ+ community?
The conversation then moved to Project 2025, the extreme right-wing agenda prepared by the Heritage Foundation that provides a blueprint for the next administration to broadly overhaul the executive branch of government.
Franklin said that while it was still unclear what elements of Project 2025 Trump may actually seek to accomplish, the program could cause immense harm if implemented. She pointed in particular to the initiative’s plan to strip words like “equity” and “gender identity” from all federal codes and regulations and to the potential funding of studies on de-transitioning.
At the same time, she predicted the Trump team would be hampered by its lack of experience. “I think this administration is going to be spectacularly incompetent,” she said. “If you look at the people that have been nominated for leadership positions, this is not a crack team of legislators or knowledgeable folks.”
The panelists closed out the webinar by providing key election takeaways and “rays of light” for the future.
Flores and Rich agreed that while people who identify as LGBTQ+ will likely be targeted by the next administration, the community’s demonstrated creativity and resilience will help combat adversity as it has before.
Murray and Turner both focused on the power of community.
“Hope is an action. It’s an action you have to engage in every day,” Turner said. “If we believe we have the power to change, we have to be engaged.”
