Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Political Science

First Advisor

Dr. Dan Palazzolo

Second Advisor

Dr. Ernest McGowen

Abstract

In this honors thesis, I evaluate how transgender, nonbinary, and other gender-diverse state legislative candidates in the United States use their campaign websites to communicate messages related to gender identity to voters, and the potential effects of communication on electoral success. I used a dataset of eighty-nine candidates between 2014 and 2024, and coded fifty-four candidate websites to measure how candidates describe their personal identity and communicate about issues related to gender identity, like LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination and gender-affirming care. While existing research evaluates how voters respond to LGBTQ+ candidates, this thesis examines how candidates potentially attract voters through their campaign strategies.

I find that candidates vary in how they choose to message identity either substantively (i.e. with respect to gender-related policy issues) or descriptively (i.e. related to personal identity) on their campaign websites. I investigate whether winning and losing candidates communicate identity differently, how candidates communicate identity while running in districts of varying competitiveness levels, and the relationship between the frequency that candidates communicate identity and their electoral performance. Drawing on descriptive cases of candidates’ websites, I analyze the frequency of how often candidates mention their personal identity and gender-identity related issues on their platforms. I find that candidates who explicitly mentioned their gender identity on their campaign websites are more likely to have lost their elections than have won them. I also find that winning candidates in the dataset tend to use more substantive language than losing candidates, while on average, losing candidates used more descriptive language than winning ones. Meanwhile, candidates in competitive districts tend to communicate identity more cautiously, emphasizing neither attribute type compared to candidates in districts that lean Democratic or lean Republican. Beyond a win-loss measure, I find that no significant relationship exists between the type of candidate communication on identity and candidate performance. This research improves our understanding about the campaigns of gender-diverse and transgender candidates, which is understudied in the literature, increasing knowledge about the experiences of nontraditional candidates in the United States.

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