MAGA Rep. Derrick Van Orden has suggested that African Americans are “not ready” to vote for a gay president.
The Wisconsin Republican was asked outside the Capitol on Thursday if he agreed with former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s assessment that the U.S. is ready to elect a gay president.
Van Orden, 57, said the question was “irrelevant.”
“Traditionally, if you look at—statistically, if you’re doing political science, African Americans don’t want to vote for a homosexual,” he told TMZ. “And I don’t care. It’s not part of my calculus when I look at a person and when I interact with a person.”
The GOP congressman explained that he was endorsed by the Log Cabin Republicans, a pro-queer conservative group, and that he doesn’t “think in those terms.”
“The Democrat Party needs to carry African American votes, or they’ll never get anybody to like them,” Van Orden continued. “And statistically speaking, if you look at the actual, uh, you know, polling stuff, African Americans are not ready to vote for a, uh, gay candidate.”
The Wisconsin rep also argued that it was “objectively” more likely for the first gay president to be a Republican than a Democrat.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Van Orden for comment.
A June study from Northwestern University found that being gay reduced a candidate’s probability of support by roughly 22 percent among Republicans, while support among Democratic voters increased slightly. Overall, identifying as gay reduced a candidate’s probability of receiving support by 7 percent nationally.
Buttigieg, who is gay, told NBC News’s Meet the Press earlier this week that “of course” America is ready for a gay president, adding that he wouldn’t have run for president in 2020 if he didn’t believe it was possible.
“What’s really on people’s minds isn’t about you, your identity as a candidate. It’s about them; it’s about their lives,” the 44-year-old said. “Right now, Americans are hurting in Trump’s economy.”
Buttigieg, however, registered zero percent support among Black respondents in an Emerson College poll conducted June 24–25, 2025. But the question asked respondents for their preferred candidate for the 2028 Democratic nomination, not whether they would vote for a gay nominee in a general election. Emerson’s methodology also cautions that demographic subgroups carry greater uncertainty because of their smaller sample sizes.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris revealed in her memoir 107 Days that Buttigieg was a prime choice to be her running mate, but she decided that the idea of a Democratic ticket featuring a Black woman and a gay man was “too big of a risk.”
The former Biden Cabinet member is a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in 2028 alongside Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
