More Voters Willing to Support Gay Candidates, But With a Condition

Leo Varadkar, whose father immigrated to Britain from India, served as Ireland’s taoiseach (head of government) from 2017 to 2020, and again from 2022 to 2024. He was the first openly gay leader of Ireland, and the country, as far as I know, did not explode. In fact, Varadkar is widely considered the greatest Irish leader who knows how to make shrimp curry.

Members of the LGBTQ community face discrimination all over the world, but eight of them, including Varadkar, have managed to reach the pinnacle of politics and serve as leaders of their respective countries.

All eight countries, you may not be surprised to learn, are in Europe, where there’s widespread acceptance of LGBTQ relationships. This is in stark contrast to many countries in Africa and Asia, where two men would be much safer holding up a bank than holding hands.

In America, three LGBTQ politicians currently serve as governors, so it’s highly likely that an LGBTQ candidate will be elected to the White House before the Cleveland Browns win the Super Bowl. It may even happen in the next decade, especially since a new study has found that many more American voters are willing to support gay candidates, but with a condition: the candidates need to look and act ‘straight.’

In other words, it’s okay to be openly gay — just don’t look or act gay.

The lead author of the study, Martin Naunov, an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University, found that being a gay candidate is quite different from being a candidate who acts and looks gay. If you’re merely gay, the average Republican voter will be far less likely to vote for you, while the average Democrat will embrace you. But if you look or act gay, both will recoil like you asked them for a date.

“Voters across the political spectrum, including those who think of themselves as allies, still show bias against candidates who look or sound even slightly gender nonconforming — a key cultural marker of gayness,” Naunov said.

“Gender nonconforming” could be a woman with a low voice or a man who likes to watch The View. It could be a man who wears makeup or a woman who loves the UFC. It could be a woman who has a buzz cut or a man who reads romance novels while waiting his turn at the nail salon.

The Northwestern study, of course, could only gauge voters’ reactions to a candidate’s appearance and voice. It’s the first political science experiment to consider not just between-group discrimination, but also within-group discrimination. It tries to measure bias against a group outright, as well as bias against those within the group who carry visible markers of their minority identity.

For example, most New York City voters had no qualms voting for a brown-skinned mayoral candidate named Zohran Mamdani. But would they have voted for him if he wore a turban, had an Indian accent and spoke more passionately about cricket than his wife?

“In the real world, bias rarely operates on group identities alone. It operates on the physical markers that make identity distinctive and visible,” Naunov said. “Bias often targets a substantial subset of the minority group who may face penalties even from people who reject anti-gay bias at the group level.”

The study found that Republicans drop their support for a candidate by about 22 percentage points if he’s gay. (If you’re a gay Republican who wants to run for office, you may want to consider conversion therapy — turning yourself into a Democrat.)

Among Democrats, being gay led to a slightly higher level of support. (Democrats won’t just vote for a gay candidate, they’ll volunteer to hand out rainbow stickers at the polling place.)

However, Democratic support drops by seven percentage points if the candidate is gender nonconforming. Republican support also drops by another seven percentage points (to a total of 29), which means that it’s better electorally to be a straight Republican candidate with 34 felony counts than a gay Republican candidate with 34 floral shirts.