Gay issues a drag for Democrats? A new poll...

There's a debate tomorrow night between the Democratic presidential candidates on LGBT issues, raising the question of how this issue set plays in presidential politics. This article from the Politico reported on a Quinnipiac poll in the crucial battleground states of Florida, OH, and PA. As the article points out, " No one has won the White House since 1960 without carrying two of those three states."

It goes on:

The Quinnipiac poll of voters in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania asked whether they would be more likely or less likely to vote for a candidate supported by various interest groups. The margin of error in the polls was 3 percent.

In Ohio, 10 percent of voters said it would make them more likely, 34 percent said less likely -- a more than 3-1 ratio -- while 54 percent said it would not make a difference. Among independent voters, perhaps the key to the state’s 20 electoral votes, 12 percent said it would make them more likely, while 28 percent said less likely.

Florida voters were similarly disposed. Ten percent of them said they are more likely to vote for a candidate backed by gay rights groups, while 28 percent said they were less likely and 60 percent said it would not make a difference. Among independents, 9 percent said more likely, 18 percent said less likely.

Pennsylvania is the one of the big three states that Democrats carried in 2000 and 2004 but there, too, more than twice as many voters -- 28 percent -- said it would make them less likely to support a candidate as the 11 percent who said it would make them more likely. Among independents, 14 percent said more likely, 19 percent said less likely.

In all three states, sizeable majorities of voters said they believe that homosexual behavior is "morally wrong" rather than "morally acceptable" -- 55-30 percent in Ohio, 53-34 percent in Pennsylvania and 51-35 percent in Florida. Yet more than half the voters in each state say they favor some form of legal recognition for gay couples.

I'm reminded of a particularly striking comment made by a caller into C-Span two years ago. He said he'd like to be a Democrat, but that party had been "tacking against Western Civilization for so long that voters like him are forced out." And he ended by saying: "And we're not coming back."

The conventional wisdom on the gay rights issue is that young people are more tolerant than their elders, and thus the inevitable drift of policy is in favor of gay rights. There's some data here from Pew. That could well be true. A lot of things could happen to affect the drift of policy and culture on this issue set. But there is also the life-cycle effect, which makes it more difficult to extrapolate what exactly their opinions are in the future. People tend to become more conservative with age. As you settle down, get married, and start building a family one's outlook changes. I remember a graduate student telling me a number of years ago about how her whole perception of life changed when she had a child. Suddenly, you care more about good schools, about crime, about preserving certain standards in the local community where that was not the case before.

Whatever the future holds, in this presidential election the question is whether the Democratic or Republican side of the coin holds an electoral advantage. The story quoted above is somewhat underwhelming, as the percentages of people saying it would make them less likely are more than likely going to be voting Republican anyway. But then you get to the part about independent voters. The percentages of more likely to less likely were 28-12 in OH, 18-9 in FL, and 19-14. This is not a winning issue for the Democrats in the presidential election ahead. The debate this week comes early enough that the eventual nominee can perhaps deemphasize his or her positions by the time November '08 comes around, but as 2008 Central put it when they blogged the last Democratic debate and this issue came up, "The Republicans are taping this." For the people for whom the issue makes a difference, the other side can pound away at it through targeted messages.

There's also the question of turnout. An LA Times blogger has this story about turnout in the gay and lesbian community. Here's the crucial portion:

The study this spring by San Francisco-based Community Marketing Inc. found that an eye-popping 92.5% of gay men reported that they voted in the 2004 presidential race, and almost 84% said they cast ballots in the 2006 midterm election. Among lesbians, the results were almost as impressive; nearly 91% said they voted in 2004; for the midterm, the figure was 78%.

By comparison, the Washington-based Committee for the Study of the American Electorate put the turnout for all Americans eligible to vote at about 61% in 2004 and roughly 40% in 2006.

Taegan Goddard got this response from a political scientist:

As a political scientist, the gay turnout story infuriates me, because it ignores everything we know about how people over-report their turnout behavior. In the American National Election Study (the highest quality election survey done in America), over 70% turnout is reported. Considering that Community Marketing is a no-name polling outfit which may have low response rates (and hence nonrandom selection), and that a survey targeting gay respondents has political undertones, it is not surprising that such a high (inflated) turnout rate was gotten. The miniscule margin of error is irrelevant—the survey is subject to much greater errors beyond sampling error including social desirability bias, non-response bias, etc. Based on these concerns, I really doubt that gays turnout at a higher lever than non-gays. I think it would be good to caveat these stories in the future