The folks looking to put a same-sex marriage initiative on next November’s ballot should take a close look at Tuesday’s election results before they plop their card tables and petitions out in front of supermarkets across California.
Tuesday was a tough night for gay rights across the country and there were plenty of indications things could get worse before they get better.
In Maine, voters repealed a law that would have allowed gay and lesbian couples to marry, a law that had the backing of the Legislature and the governor. Opponents of the repeal raised more money, ran a better grassroots campaign and even had a nine-point lead in the polls three weeks before the election. But they still lost, 53 percent to 47 percent.
The news was better in Washington state, where voters backed a referendum upholding a law granting registered domestic partners the same “rights, responsibilities and obligations” as married couples.
But the referendum, which specifically stated that “a domestic partnership is not a marriage,” won with less than 52 percent of the vote. While the measure rolled up big margins in the urban areas around Seattle, it was crushed in the rural parts of the state.
One year ago, California voters passed Prop. 8, a constitutional amendment that banned same-marriage in California, even though gay and lesbian couples had been able to legally marry in the state since the previous June.
You sense a trend here?
Sometime in the next two weeks, the attorney general’s office is going to approve the wording of an initiative that would repeal Prop. 8 and make same-sex marriage legal again. Its backers plan to collect 1 million signatures to put the measure on the ballot as quickly as possible.
For groups like Love Honor Cherish, which is leading the drive for a November 2010 initiative, the reasoning is simple: Same-sex couples need to get their rights back and it should happen as quickly as possible.
The problem with that reasoning is that it brushes off the 52 percent to 48 percent vote in favor of Prop. 8 as an aberration, a one-time hiccup by California voters. Gay marriage lost, the argument goes, because supporters were overconfident, ran a lousy campaign and didn’t reach out to all the voters who certainly would have supported same-sex marriage if they had just gotten better information about it.
Missing from that breezy explanation is any recognition of just how deeply California is divided over the question and that there is no known argument that’s going to change the opinion of opponents who believe that same-sex marriage is simply wrong.
It also fails to recognize that all the stars aligned last November for same-sex marriage supporters. The presidential election brought out a record number of voters and the Obama campaign attracted plenty of young people, exactly the group most likely to support a gay rights measure.
To get an idea of how things have changed in a year, look at Tuesday’s special election in the Contra Costa County-centered 10th Congressional District.
In 2008, President Obama collected 65 percent of the vote in the district, the same percentage Democrat Rep. Ellen Tauscher received in her re-election bid.
Fast-forward to Tuesday night, when Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, one of California’s best-known politicians, could grab only 52 percent of the vote in his winning race against David Harmer, a little-known Republican.
It’s a virtual guarantee that many of the young voters who showed up for Obama and stayed to vote against Prop. 8 didn’t cast ballots Tuesday, not only in California, but also in New Jersey and Virginia, where conservative Republicans took over the governorships.
And any trend that favors conservatives is bad news for gay rights.
The governor’s race will be at the top of the ballot next November, but it still won’t attract as many voters as a presidential race. And no one knows if those new Obama voters – and likely same-sex marriage supporters – will turn out.
Many of the California’s largest gay rights groups worry that next year is too soon to put together a winning campaign and want to save the same-sex marriage initiative for 2012, when it would join Obama’s re-election campaign on the ballot.
A serious look at Tuesday’s races in Maine and Washington, states not known as conservative strongholds, should help convince gay marriage supporters that waiting until 2012 is a good idea, since they’re likely to need all the help they can get.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.