USA TODAY International Edition
Red-state Dems see benefit to shift on gay rights
Support of issue could help some get re-elected
WASHINGTON – When Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly was elected to the Senate in 2012, he asserted that marriage is between a man and a woman. But as the endangered Democrat campaigns for re-election, Donnelly is touting his support for gay rights.
“Joe is proud to stand with LGBTQ Hoosiers,” his campaign said in a fundraising appeal in June that led with a photo of Donnelly marching in the Cadillac Barbie Indiana Pride Parade.
Donnelly is not the only red-state Democrat who went from opposing same-sex marriage in 2012 to viewing it as an issue that could help boost him over the finish line this year.
Others include North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, Missouri’s Claire McCaskill and Montana’s Jon Tester. They represent the unity the party now has on gay rights, which still divide Republicans.
"We must end discrimination in any form," Heitkamp said in June in a tweet that included a photo of her with the message "NO H8" written on her cheek.
In a midterm election in which Democrats have more Senate seats to defend – including several in “Trump states” – vulnerable Democrats like Heitkamp could benefit from the growing political power of the LGBTQ movement. A record number of LGBTQ candidates are running for office. And the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) has significantly expanded its grassroots activity in an effort to “pull the emergency brake on the Trump-Pence administration’s hate-fueled agenda.”
Top-priority states are Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – mostly swing states that play a big role in presidential elections as well as having Senate, gubernatorial or other important races this year.
But even red-state Democrats could benefit from HRC’s effort to identify – and target – millions of “equality” voters across the country. The group has identified more than 500,000 sympathetic voters in Indiana and Missouri, for example, and nearly 100,000 in Montana.
“LGBTQ people do not just live in New York and L.A.,” said JoDee Winterhof, HRC’s senior vice president for policy and political affairs. “We live all over this beautiful country.”
Donnelly, Heitkamp, Tester and other Democratic senators switched their positions on same-sex marriage in 2013 as the Supreme Court began considering the question.
“I’m proud to support marriage equality because no one should be able to tell a Montanan or any American who they can love and who they can marry,” Tester wrote on Facebook in March 2013.
During the 2012 campaign, Tester had said that while he backed civil unions for committed same-sex couples, “in Montana, marriage is between one man and one woman.”
“This is an issue that in the last 20 years has seen such a shift legally, a shift politically, and just a shift in public opinion,” said Paul Helmke, an Indiana University civics professor and former GOP officeholder. “The politicians were trying to catch up with the courts as much as anything.”
Only 37 percent of the public supported allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally in 2007, compared with 62 percent in 2017, after the Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that same-sex couples have a fundamental right to marry, according to the Pew Research Center.
Among Republicans, however, opinion is still nearly evenly divided. The reasons are a combination of age and religion, said Geoffrey Layman, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame who has written a book about religious and cultural conflicts in party politics. “Older people and more religious people tend to be less supportive of same-sex marriage, and the Republican coalition is both older and more religious,” Layman said.
In fact, as Donnelly marched in the Indianapolis gay pride parade this summer, Indiana Republicans were fighting over whether the party should continue to back marriage as a union “between a man and a woman.”
Mike Braun, the Republican hoping to knock off Donnelly this fall, joined social conservatives in fending off a change to the language included in the party's platform when Vice President Mike Pence was governor.
“There was an overwhelming part of the party that wanted to stick with traditional marriage,” Braun said in an interview recently.
Around the same time, Log Cabin Republicans in Texas succeeded in removing from the state GOP platform language calling homosexuality a “chosen behavior that ... must not be presented as an acceptable alternative lifestyle.” But the party continues to define marriage as a “God-ordained, legal, and moral commitment only between one natural man and one natural woman.”
Still, Gregory Angelo, the national president of Log Cabin Republicans, said that while there remains a difference of opinion in the party on the issue, there is a consensus that opposition to same-sex marriage as the centerpiece of someone’s campaign is no longer a winning strategy.
The larger problem for Republicans, he said, is that even if the issue is not front-and-center in elections, voters – especially younger ones – still look to a candidate's positions on equality issues as a “cultural litmus test that can provide greater insight into where a candidate’s heart and conscience really lies.”
“What you’re seeing in 2018 is Democratic candidates who are using their support for the LGBT community as a wedge issue to drive supporters to the voting booth,” he said, “and to vilify Republicans who oppose them.”