The Gay or Anti-Gay Vote

Some interesting posts going on here that echo what I've been saying about gay marriage. I do not think the opposition to gay marriage is all about bigotry. I think people are in favor of giving gay folks the same rights (ie Civil Unions), but they aren't ready to accept "gay marriage." It's all about the nomenclature and we need to around this idea that government sanctions certain marriages and not....government recognizes contracts and marriage is simply one form of contract, that we need to rename, lest it be confused with marriage in the eyes of the church.

Let's be honest, though. Marriage is the eyes of the church has been under assult for 40 years, with the advent of birth control and the increasing number of women in the workplace, no longer dependant on their husbands. This has caused two things to rise: pre-marital sex and divorce, which have done substantially more to erode the instutition of marriage than all the gays in America could possibly do.

One bone of contention with Mr. Reynolds, though, is his discrediting the exit polls. Exit polls are notoriously bad at predicting vote counts and results, but what they are particularly good at is understanding voting demographics and understanding voting motivation by doing a sample and finding results of the sample.

In close races, with a large number of votes, the margin for error is around 5%. As you can see, this could swing 52-48 either way, which any swing state is easily under. But that same 5% applied to a figure, say 55% of Bush voters made gay marriage an issue, all of a sudden becomes quite relevant....because even if the number is off, it still accounts for between 60%-50% of the Bush votes being motivated by a particular issue versus another issue, like the war.