Give Us a Reason – Center for Disability Rights

What the LGBTQ+ Movement Understood About Voter Mobilization That the Disability Rights Movement Hasn’t Yet Learned

By Bruce Darling

Years ago, I watched Tim Mains run for Rochester City Council. It was raining hard on Election Day. I didn’t have a car. For a while, I considered not going. Then, I trudged through the rain and voted. Tim Mains won by eleven votes out of more than thirty-eight thousand cast — despite carrying the Democratic Party’s endorsement and the endorsement of every major newspaper in town. That race made him the first openly gay elected official in New York State.

I tell that story because I think it says something true that gets lost every time this movement talks about voter turnout – the rain was a real barrier. It didn’t stop me. What got me out the door wasn’t the absence of an obstacle — it was the presence of a reason. I knew what was at stake. As a young gay man, it was personal. I knew my vote might matter to the outcome, and that was enough to make the barrier worth pushing through.

Disabled people push through barriers constantly. It is, in a real sense, what this community does better than almost anyone — we solve access problems every single day because we have no other choice. So when I look at the persistent gap between how often Disabled people vote and how often non-disabled people vote, I don’t think the primary story is that the barriers are uniquely insurmountable for us. I think the story is that, too often, nobody has given Disabled voters a clear, personal, honest reason that the barrier is worth pushing through for.

The LGBTQ+ movement figured this out, deliberately, in two stages, over about twenty years. I want to walk through what those two stages actually looked like, compare it honestly to where the disability rights movement stands today, and make the case for what I think stage one actually requires of us right now — not persuading Disabled people to care about someone else’s issue, but demanding that a party that claims to be our ally finally does what it did for LGBTQ+ voters in 1992, and hasn’t yet done for Disabled folks.

Part I: How the LGBTQ+ Movement Built a Voting Bloc, in Two Stages

Stage One: Acknowledgment
Before 1992, the Democratic Party’s relationship with gay voters was thin, symbolic, and mostly reactive. A nondiscrimination plank here, a convention speaker there — gestures, not commitments. The AIDS crisis forced some engagement through the 1980s, but it was defensive engagement, driven by an emergency the party hadn’t chosen to lead on, not a deliberate courtship of gay voters as a constituency worth winning.

In 1992, that changed, and it changed through a push and a pull happening at the same time. Pat Buchanan’s prime-time “culture war” speech at the Republican National Convention named “gay rights” as the enemy, explicitly and nationally — that was the push. Bill Clinton supplied the pull – he actively courted gay voters, secured the Human Rights Campaign’s first-ever presidential endorsement, promised to protect gay federal workers, and made the AIDS epidemic a real campaign priority rather than an inconvenience to be managed. On the ground, this showed up as visible, organized gay voter mobilization — Castro Street in San Francisco filled with Clinton-Gore signs and weekend voter registration tables, with one activist quoted at the time saying gay people were “going ape” over Clinton.

That is what acknowledgment looks like. Not just a policy position buried in a platform — a candidate who actively sought out the community, said so publicly, and built a relationship with its institutions. 1992 is the year LGBTQ+ voters became an organized, loyal Democratic constituency, and by most accounts, Democrats have won that vote in every presidential election since.

Stage Two: The Demand for More
Acknowledgment was the beginning, not the end. Within a generation, LGBTQ+ organizations built the infrastructure to convert acknowledgment into leverage — and leverage into an explicit, public standard that politicians and institutions were expected to meet, with consequences attached if they didn’t.

You can see the shape of that shift by 2010, when Democratic donor pressure over stalled LGBTQ+ priorities got sharp enough that a blogger coined the term “GayTM” — the accusation that the party treated the community as a source of money to be tapped, not a constituency to be served. Major donors withheld funds from Obama-aligned political operations in 2012 until he endorsed marriage equality, and when he did, the fundraising surged — gay bundlers alone raised more that quarter than the party’s Hollywood donors combined. That is a movement that had learned it could say: “Acknowledgment isn’t enough anymore; deliver something specific, or we act.”

The Human Rights Campaign eventually formalized that leverage into permanent, public infrastructure. Its Corporate Equality Index, Municipal Equality Index, and Healthcare Equality Index score institutions publicly on LGBTQ+ policy — a standing mechanism that converts “do better” from a request into a public, recurring, comparable measurement. On the electoral side, HRC built an “Equality Voter” model — using data analytics to identify tens of millions of voters, LGBTQ+ and allied, who could be organized around explicit, named policy stakes, not vague goodwill. By its 2026 electoral program, HRC was working from a base of 74 million self-identified Equality Voters, spending tens of millions of dollars on direct turnout in specific swing states, framed explicitly as a demand: deliver the winning margin, and expect this constituency to hold you accountable for what you do with it.

The result shows up directly in turnout data. In HRC’s own 2026 polling, 92% of LGBTQ+ voters said they “definitely will vote,” compared to 68% of non-LGBTQ+ voters — a 24-point gap in the opposite direction of where the disability community sits. That is not an accident of demographics. It is what happens when a community has been given, over three decades, a specific reason its votes matter, a party that visibly delivered on that reason at least once, and a permanent mechanism for demanding the party keep delivering.

Part II: We Have Our Equality Act. It Hasn’t Been Acknowledged.

Here is the comparison I actually want to make, and I want to be precise about it, because it is not the comparison people usually reach for.

The disability rights movement is not missing a flagship ask the way people sometimes assume. We have one. Olmstead v. L.C. established, more than twenty-five years ago, that unjustified institutionalization of Disabled people is a form of discrimination under the ADA — that we have a right to live in our own communities, not warehoused in facilities, when community-based support could meet our needs. The Latonya Reeves Freedom Act is the legislative vehicle to make that right real and enforceable, closing the gaps that decades of underfunded, optional Medicaid HCBS coverage have left open. This is not a scattered list of grievances. It is a single, coherent, legally grounded demand with a real bill number attached to it, the same way marriage equality was a single, coherent, legally grounded demand with the Respect for Marriage Act and years of state-by-state litigation behind it.

We also know exactly what the issues underneath that demand are, because Disabled people live them every day: institutionalization, inaccessible and unaffordable housing, the absence of real transportation options, forced medication, and a society that still, structurally, treats Disabled lives as worth less. These are not abstractions in need of a policy translator. They are the same category of stakes that mobilized gay voters in 1992 — the freedom to live your own life, on your own terms, without the state deciding you don’t get to.

What we don’t have is stage one. Clinton did something specific and public for gay voters in 1992: he sought them out, endorsed their flagship priority, and built a visible relationship with their institutions. As of this writing, the Democratic Party as a national party has not done the equivalent for LRFA and Olmstead enforcement. Individual members have co-sponsored it. Individual offices have taken meetings. But there has been no Clinton moment — no instance of a national Democratic standard-bearer treating Olmstead the way marriage equality was eventually treated: as a defining, named commitment the party is willing to be held to, in public, by name.

That is a different failure than the failures I described in a companion piece about this movement drifting from its own principles toward the broader progressive coalition’s priorities. This is not about our own leadership losing its way. This is about the party we have organized alongside for decades declining to do for us what it did for another community it also organizes alongside — and I think that distinction matters enormously for what we ask for next.

I want to be fair to the difference in circumstance, because it is real. The Equality Act had decades of state-level marriage litigation and a single, easily nationalized symbol — the wedding — driving public sympathy well before 2012. Olmstead enforcement is legally cleaner in some ways and more diffuse in its public face – there is no single image as universally legible as a wedding. But I don’t think that difference excuses the absence of acknowledgment. It just means the acknowledgment has to be built more deliberately, through exactly the kind of GOTV and messaging work described below — not waited for.

2024: A Missed Chance to Draw the Contrast
I watched this play out in real time in 2024, and I want to describe what I saw, with a clear line between what is independently documented and what is my own firsthand assessment as someone who was in the room.

What is documented goes back further than 2024, and it is starker than I have sometimes described it. After the Summer of ADAPT protests were widely credited with saving Obamacare in 2017, many of us believed the Disability Community had earned Democratic acknowledgment of Olmstead enforcement as its own defining commitment — that our movement’s biggest recent win had bought us the same kind of relationship gay voters got from Clinton in 1992. Instead, by direction of Democratic House Leadership, no Democrat in the House of Representatives was willing to reintroduce the Disability Integration Act in January 2019; it had to be introduced by a Republican, Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner. That pattern continued into the fight over the Latonya Reeves Freedom Act: staff for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries confirmed to ADAPT activists that, despite widespread support from rank-and-file Democrats, caucus leadership would not back it. The formal discharge petition on LRFA (H.R. 2708) was ultimately filed by Rep. Steve Cohen on November 13, 2024 — after Election Day, not before it.

Here is my own assessment, having watched this firsthand. ADAPTers were at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that summer, and in conversations with Leader Jeffries’ office, it was made clear to us directly that our concerns were heard, but the party went a different direction anyway. Instead of endorsing LRFA – a bill with a name, a number, and a clear yes-or-no position Republicans would have had to answer – the Harris campaign put forward a proposal to develop a plan for Medicare to cover home care. I watched the reaction to that proposal unfold in real time on social media, and what I saw was not enthusiasm. It was confusion — questions about what the proposal actually meant, how it would work, and how it was different from what already existed — outnumbering anything that looked like the excitement a real commitment generates.

It was the 1992 moment we didn’t get. I think it is worth being specific about why. A candidate endorsing LRFA by name would have done exactly what Clinton’s HRC endorsement did – given Disabled voters and Republicans alike a clear, binary marker to react to, and given the Harris campaign a sharp, values-based contrast with Trump on an issue where the stakes — institutionalization, forced medication, the right to live in your own home — are exactly the kind of personal, high-stakes freedom claim that moves people to vote. A proposal to “develop a plan” for Medicare to study home care coverage is the language of a policy shop, not a campaign asking for anyone’s vote. It has the same shape as the shift from “Our Homes, Not Nursing Homes” to “work requirements” that I’ve written about elsewhere — systems language standing in for a reason to show up.

Part III: The Rain, the Barrier, and the Reason

I said at the start that I don’t think the turnout gap between Disabled and non-disabled voters is primarily a story about barriers being uniquely insurmountable for us. I want to be careful here, because the barriers are absolutely real, well-documented, and worth fixing regardless of anything else in this piece.

The numbers are not small. As of the most recent national data, Disabled voters turn out at a rate roughly four to six points lower than non-disabled voters — a gap that has narrowed significantly since 2000, when it stood at nearly seventeen points, but has never closed. Closing even the current, narrower gap would mean close to two million additional Disabled voters nationally — more than enough to decide close elections, in exactly the kind of tight, decisive-margin races both parties fight over every cycle. Access difficulties are real and documented too. In the most recent national post-election survey, fourteen percent of Disabled voters reported some difficulty voting, more than three times the rate reported by non-disabled voters.

So the barriers are real, the data confirms it, and REV UP and organizations like it are right to keep fighting to remove them. But barriers alone have never been a sufficient explanation for who does and doesn’t vote, for any community, including this one. I trudged through rain with no car because I had a reason that made the trudging worth it. Disabled people solve access problems constantly, in every other part of our lives, because we have to. And we’re good at it. A community this practiced at working around obstacles is not a community that stays home primarily because the obstacle was hard. It is, at least in significant part, a community that stays home when nobody has made the case that pushing through the obstacle will change anything real about their life.

That is where the messaging failure I wrote about in a companion piece connects directly to this one. When this movement fought the 2017 Medicaid cuts, the language was “Our Homes, Not Nursing Homes” and “rather go to jail than die without Medicaid” — stakes anyone could feel in their body, without a policy background, immediately. When this movement fought the far larger 2025 Medicaid cuts, the language was “work requirements,” “redeterminations,” and “provider tax restrictions” — accurate, serious, and almost entirely unusable as a reason to trudge through the rain. You cannot get someone off their couch and to a polling place, in a storm, on the strength of an eligibility-verification schedule. You can get them there with “this is about whether you and your friends get to keep living in your own homes.”

As our organizing language for legislative fights has drifted from freedom to systems, our voter mobilization language has certainly drifted the same way, for the same underlying reason — an increasingly professionalized advocacy class that talks fluently to Hill staff and grant officers, and less fluently to the Disabled person deciding whether the barrier in front of them is worth it this time. REV UP’s own materials, to their credit, already name the access side of this clearly – closing the gap means removing the barriers. What is missing, more often than not, is the other half — a clear, specific, personal answer to the question every voter, Disabled or not, is actually asking before they go out the door into the rain: “What does this get me?”

Dawn Russell and I put this more sharply in a 2025 memo comparing the 2017 and 2025 Medicaid fights. We wrote, “Saving funding for nursing facilities does not motivate Disabled people to put our bodies on the line.” That is worth thinking about as a voter-mobilization point, not just an organizing-tactics point. A funding message cannot tell a Disabled voter whether the money being defended helps them stay in their own home or helps pay for the institution they are afraid of — Medicaid funds both. A freedom message can. “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” Frederick Douglass said — a line that same ADAPT memo points out belongs to a fellow Rochesterian. Voters, like elected officials, respond to demands they can feel are theirs. Nobody has ever gotten out of bed on a rainy Election Day to defend a reimbursement formula.

Part IV: What We Should Actually Be Asking For

I want to be explicit about what this piece is not arguing, because I think it would be easy to misread. This is not an argument that Disabled people should be persuaded to vote based on other communities’ issues, or that our movement should broaden its message to encompass every progressive priority in order to build a bigger coalition. I have already made the opposite argument elsewhere — that this movement has spent real credibility trying to convince Disabled people to care more about other movements’ fights, often at the expense of our own founding issues. That is not what closing the turnout gap requires.

What it requires is narrower, and I think more achievable – a party willing to do for Olmstead and LRFA what it did for marriage equality in 1992 and after – acknowledge it, by name, from the top of the ticket, as a defining commitment; build a real, visible relationship with the organizations and voters who care about it; and then accept being held publicly accountable for delivering on it, the way HRC’s scorecards and Equality Voter model hold politicians accountable now.

This also means learning something specific from how the LGBTQ+ movement has handled its own wins. As we put it in that same 2025 memo, citing the movement’s own example directly – “When the Supreme Court ruled in support of same sex marriage, they immediately called for passage of the Equality Act in the press statements praising the court’s decision.” That is playing offense — using a win to demand the next thing, immediately, while the momentum and the attention are still there. This movement has spent most of the last decade playing defense: protecting Medicaid, protecting the ADA, responding to attacks rather than pressing our own advantage. Defense never gives a voter a reason to show up; it only gives them a reason to be afraid. Stage one — the acknowledgment this piece is asking for — has to be demanded as an offensive move, not requested as a favor.

And that demand doesn’t require this movement to speak with one voice, even as it holds one clear demand. “Solidarity does not mean uniformity,” as that same memo put it — permission for Disabled organizers to stop borrowing our allies’ talking points and speak instead in our own authentic register about what freedom actually means to each of us. A parent fighting to keep their child out of an institution, a wheelchair user fighting for accessible transit, a person fighting forced medication — each has their own true story underneath the same demand. Voter mobilization built on those real, specific, personal stories will always outperform mobilization built on a single approved script, even while every one of those stories points at the same acknowledgment we are owed.

Concretely, I think that means:

We demand, directly and by name, for a national Democratic standard-bearer to acknowledge Olmstead and the Latonya Reeves Freedom Act

We build our own version of the Equality Voter model

We build our own version of a public scorecard

We keep fighting the access barriers REV UP and others have documented

None of this requires abandoning anything this movement already believes. It requires demanding, loudly and specifically, that our political home do for us what it has already shown it knows how to do for another community it claims as an ally — and it requires being honest with ourselves that until that acknowledgment happens, no amount of accessible ballot design will close a gap that is, at its root, about whether Disabled voters have been given a reason.