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Hillary Clinton Polls: Dem Nominee Has Lost 30 Percent Of Gay Support Since Orlando Shooting

By Robert Jonathan
Published on: 10:55 PST, Jun 22, 2016

Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee, has supposedly lost about 30 percent of her support from the LGBT community since the ISIS-inspired terrorist attack at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub.

These were the findings according to the Reuters daily presidential election tracking poll.

Polling this far out from the actual election day may or may not be meaningful so your mileage may vary. Moreover, in general, some polling organizations have a financial and/or an ideological stake in arriving at a particular result, which may affect the methodology used to gather the information.

The gay community is traditionally a strong constituency group for the Democrats.

Parenthetically, during her 2014 book tour for Hard Choices, The Atlantic indicated that Hillary Clinton opposed gay marriage when she ran for president in 2008 and held that view through 2013. While promoting the memoir, Clinton had a contentious exchange with NPR Host Terry Gross over the marriage equality issue.

On June 12, the day of the Orlando shooting, Reuters showed Hillary Clinton getting 65 percent of the votes of those identifying as members of the LGBT cohort.

As of yesterday, June 21, her support has dropped precipitously to 41 percent. Those respondents indicating that they would either stay home or vote for someone else increased dramatically from 25 percent to 42 percent.

Over that same time frame, Donald Trump’s LGBT support has risen from 10 percent to 17 percent. Last week, the New York real estate mogul and GOP presumptive presidential nominee boasted that the “LGBT community is starting to like Donald Trump very, very much lately.”

As the Inquisitr previously reported, gun sales to the LGBT community reportedly appear to have spiked after the Orlando nightclub shooting. Obama, Clinton, and many like-minded politicians have primarily portrayed the horrific Orlando shooting more as a gun control issue than one involving terrorism. Donald Trump has previously declared that Hillary Clinton would abolish the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, through left-leaning judges appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which currently has one vacancy following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

In his big speech today, Donald Trump argued, among other things, that Hillary Clinton through her family foundation accepted millions of dollars in donations from Middle Eastern countries with harsh human rights records insofar as the way they treat gays and women.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUW2-MUonbo

He also criticized Clinton for an open-door immigration policy for refugees from that part of the world. “The father of the Orlando shooter was a Taliban supporter from Afghanistan, one of the most repressive anti-gay and anti-women regimes on Earth. I only want to admit people who share our values and love our people. Hillary Clinton wants to bring in people who believe women should be enslaved and gays put to death,” Trump claimed.

According to a separate poll from the Morning Consult organization, voters “trust Donald Trump more than Hillary Clinton to keep America safe following the Orlando terror attack” by a relatively narrow margin of 41 percent to 37 percent. Trump gets a stronger nod from independents by a margin of 38 percent to 26 percent.

As far as Trump’s controversial proposal for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration, “almost half (48 percent) said they support a ban, 40 percent said they oppose, and 11 percent said they didn’t know or had no opinion.” Republicans, and to a lesser extent independents, are more favorably disposed to the idea than Democrats. The support for such a ban increases substantially across the board if it applies just to Syria and Iraq. The Morning Consult derived its findings from a survey of about 2,000 voters from June 15-18, with a two percent margin of error.

Reuters has noticed that the strong opposition to the temporary ban on Muslim immigration has allegedly dropped in the gay community, from 82 percent in early June to 58 percent as of yesterday.

A Latino Trump supporter in California who was reportedly beaten up by anti-Trump protesters in San Jose after a Trump rally there has claimed that it’s a lot more difficult to publicly support Donald Trump than to come out as gay.

In a new Bloomberg politics poll, 22 percent of Bernie Sanders voters plan on voting for Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton. Sanders has yet to officially endorse Hillary Clinton.

[Photo by Chuck Burton/AP]

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