Although you can hardly call it a representative study, Karen L. Blair PhD (an assistant professor of psychology at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada) contacted 249 mostly male Utahn voters who had taken a test measuring their conservative political leanings and attitudes towards the LGBTQ community. Among the 11.6 percent who planned to vote for Trump, Blair found higher levels of sexism, racism and queerphobia — shocking, right?
Blair wrote:
“Clinton voters in this sample reported significantly more positive attitudes towards a number of groups within our society, including gay men, transgender and gender diverse individuals, women, and ethnic minorities. Clinton voters also showed significantly lower levels of Islamophobia than Trump voters, but were not significantly different on this measure compared to voters who were still undecided or planning to vote for a third party candidate.”
“In other words,” Blair said, “given Clinton’s definition of ‘a basket of deplorables’ as being people who hold ‘racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic [and] Islamophobic’ sentiments, Trump supporters do appear to exemplify these qualities in comparison to Clinton supporters.”
It’s not at all surprising that Trump’s supporters would share his prejudiced worldview. Even though some gay people support Trump, Trump has still built his campaign on barely muted homophobia, Islamophobia and sexism.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Trump’s chances at actually being elected remain pretty low, even despite his hard core of support among one-third of the general electorate; even gay stats wizard Nate Silver places his chances of winning at 16 percent. Hate doesn’t win.
