It is not really something that's talked about as much as the racial groups or the evangelical vote, but gay voters are another group of voters that should be viewed as significant by BOTH political parties.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/us/politics/gay-vote-seen-as-crucial-in-obamas-victory.html?_r=0According to national exit polls, gays made up 5% of voters in 2012. 77% of them voted for Obama, 23% voted for Romney. So there is still about 1/4 of gays that vote Republican, which I think is shocking since the Republicans are so antigay.
Obama got a 7% increase from GLBT voters in 2012, up from 70% in 2008.
Gays also increased by 1% as a voting group, but one could argue that there's more gays now than ever before... the baby boomers are living longer and the age of first coming out is now younger than ever but these GLBT kids cannot vote yet.
The straight vote was split 49-49 in 2012, which means that its possible that that 5% of gay voters swung the election to Obama. (
http://www.advocate.com/politics/election/2012/11/15/if-obama-and-romney-split-straight-vote-then-lgbt-americans-decided)
Why then is there so little discussed about the importance of gay voters? What's more astonishing is that the Republican Party is still so antigay when there are 6.5 million GLBT voters out there and the last election was decided by 5 million votes?
It doesn't make much sense to go out of your way to antagonize a whole key group of voters, not when they number more than the voter margin of victory.
