Proposition 8 Slips Past The Margins

Looking at more polls, here's today's Field Poll release: Californians are preparing to reject Proposition 8 by a margin of 42-51. That's a nine-point defeat for the Defense of Bigotry Amendment. The sample error on this poll is 3.9%. So giving all the margins to the proponents of the initiative, that's still 46-47 against.

Previous polls had indicated that the primary cleavage among voters on this issue was age, with older voters favoring the amendment and younger voters rejecting it. The Field Poll reports the following age cleavages, with the margin between "No" and "Yes" computed by me and added to the table:

Age of Respondent	Percentage of Sample	Yes on Prop. 8 (would ban SSM)	No on Prop. 8 (permit SSM)	Undecided	Margin of Rejection
18-29	13%	41%	55%	4%	14%
30-39	18%	43%	46%	11%	3%
40-49	21%	46%	49%	5%	3%
50-65	29%	38%	57%	5%	19%
65 and older	19%	46%	47%	7%	1%
Total	100%	42%	51%	7%	9%

Three things of significance that I see here.

First, a sizeable number of people who were against same-sex marriage shortly after The Marriage Cases were announces seem to have changed their minds dramatically about the issue. Perhaps the thinking is, "Well, they're married now, so we shouldn't change that."

Second, every age segment of the polling population is rejecting the initiative. Pre-Boomers are close to evenly split. But Baby Boomers register the largest margin of rejection of all. So perhaps the point of cleavage isn't 40, as the Los Angeles Times had suggested, but instead is 65, or older.

And third, the overall total represents an actual majority rejecting the amendment. Even if all of the "undecided" voters go in favor of the amendment, that's still a majority voting it down.

There are other interesting data to note -- Latinos seem more in favor of the initiative than any other racial group. Northern California (that is, north of the Bay Area) respondents are in favor it it by the largest margin of any geographical area, although "yes" has a slight lead in all inland counties considered together. Evangelical or Protestant Christians, and those who self-identify as "strongly" or "moderately" conservative favor the initiatve. Pretty much everyone else so are inland counties as opposed to coastal counties. This suggests that the breadth of support for same-sex marriage is growing as Californians get used to the idea and they realize that they aren't being hurt by gay people marrying each other at all.

And personally knowing or working with gays or lesbians seems to change attitudes in favor of marriage by 8 to 9 percentage points. Nearly three-quarters of the respondents said that yes, they personally knew or worked with someone who was gay or lesbian. It's hard to hate someone that you know to be a more or less good person.

I don't see it getting any better for Proposition 8 as we move closer to the general election, either.