LGBT POV

This feels too familiar – the down-to-the-wire, knot-in-the-stomach, hold your breath last minute look at the polls before the election tomorrow. The Maine campaign noted this morning that between the $1.1 million from the National Organization for Marriage and the antigay Stand for Marriage last minute ad buy, the No on 1/Protect Maine Equality campaign is being out-spent and out PR-ed.

Not only that – but there is a perception that No on 1 is flush with cash – which has virtually stopped their ability to fund-raise. With 24 hours to go – the No on 1 campaign desperately needs help to keep up with the antigay forces surge in ad buys. They need OUR help for ONE LAST AD BUY.

Here’s the ACT BLUE PAGE to contribute – http://www.actblue.com/page/noon1redalert.

OR CLICK HERE.

From Public Policy Polling this morning:

Marriage still close in Maine

Maine voters narrowly favor Question 1, which would reverse the state’s law legalizing same sex marriage.

At 51-47 it’s within the margin of error but there has been slight movement in support of the question since a PPP poll two weeks ago showed it knotted up at 48.

The measure’s fate could be determined by the age composition of the electorate on Tuesday. Senior citizens support it by a 59-40 margin while voters under 30 oppose it 51-48. Last year exit polls showed more voters under 30 turning out for the Presidential election than ones over 65 but we expect seniors to turn out at a much higher rate than younger voters this year, as is often the case in off year elections. If the electorate ends up being younger than we anticipate the fight could be even closer.

Independents support the measure 52-46. There are slightly more Democrats (27%) in favor of it than there are Republicans (22%) opposed to it. Men support it by a 56-42 margin, women are opposed 52-46. It’s just going to come down to which side does the better job of getting its people out.

On Question 4, which is the Taxpayers Bill of Rights (TABOR 2), the outcome is more clear. 57% of voters are opposed to it with just 39% in favor. 76% of Democrats, 53% of independents, and even 39% of Republicans say they will vote against it and it’s safe to say it has no chance with that level of opposition from the GOP.

Full results here

This is from FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver this morning:

Maine — Question 1 – “Do you want to reject the new law that lets same-sex couples marry and allows individuals and religious groups to refuse to perform these marriages?” .

The Positions: A ‘Yes’ vote overturns same-sex marriage, which the state legislature approved in May. A ‘No’ vote preserves same-sex marriage.

The Polls: As in the other elections this cycle, recent polling shows somewhat contradictory results. A Research 2000 / Daily Kos poll shows Question 1 losing by one point. A Pan Atlantic SMS poll shows the initiative losing by 11 points. But a fresh PPP poll shows it passing by 4 points. The Research 2000 and Pan Atlantic polls showed slight movement toward the ‘No’ side from their previous surveys, while the PPP poll showed movement toward the ‘Yes’ side. The only other pollster to have surveyed the race is Democracy Corps, which had shown Question 1 losing by 9 points among both registered and likely voters, although that poll is now five weeks old.

Analysis: All the polls show a very low number of undecideds, so like most close elections, it’s a question of turnout. And the pollsters have different opinions about what turnout is liable to be. PPP has people under 45 representing about 38 percent of the electorate, whereas Research 2000 has them at 51 percent of the electorate. PPP’s figures are a closer match for Maine’s 2006 electorate, when 36 percent of voters were 45 or under.

On the other hand, PPP shows conservatives outnumbering liberals 36-23, whereas those numbers have been about evenly split in exit polling of Maine’s elections in 2004, 2006 and 2008. Were the liberal-conservative split to match 2006, for example, when Maine’s electorate was 26 percent liberal, 26 percent conservative, and 48 percent moderate, then Question 1 would fail 46-53, according to PPP’s internals.

While an electorate that favorable to liberals might be somewhat unlikely in an off-year election, there is also not a lot of evidence that conservatives have the edge in terms of organization or enthusiasm. On the contrary, the No-on-1 campaign has received contributions from 9 times as many Mainers as the Yes-on-1 side, and Yes-on-1’s messaging has been haphazard, to put it generously. With that said, the gay marriage question is one on which conservatives have typically had an enthusiasm advantage, although that may be changing, with conservatives devoting more of their energies to abortion and fiscal policy.

One last methodological issue worth mentioning may be cellphone-only households, which continue to make up ahigher and higher percentage of the survey base and which none of these pollsters, to my knowledge, are including in their surveys. Some previous studies have found a particularly strong split on the gay marriage question based on cellphone usage, with the younger and perhaps more sociable cellphone-only crowd tending to be more supportive of gay marriage.

The Odds: A statistical analysis I conducted last month, which was based on the results from previous gay marriage referenda in other states, gave the Yes on 1 side just an 11 percent chance of prevailing, although the fraction rises to 32 percent after an ad-hoc adjustment for the fact that this is an off-year election. In spite of the PPP poll, I’m not especially persuaded to deviate substantially from those numbers: the polling average still favors the ‘No’ side, albeit narrowly; the ‘No’ side seems to have run the superior campaign, and the cellphone issue may be worth a point or two. The tight polling, certainly, should keep everybody on their toes, and gay marriage could quite easily be overturned. But I’d still put the Yes on 1 side as about a 5-to-2 underdog.