EQCA Releases Political Consultant Reports on 2010 vs 2012

Last week, in response to Prepare To Prevail: Why We Must Wait In Order To Win, Marc Solomon, Marriage Director for Equality California asked the following question of some of the top political consultants in California:

Based on the research and data that is presently available, when do you recommend returning to the ballot to try to overturn Proposition 8: 2010, 2012, or other? On what do you base your conclusion?

What do you believe are the most important steps that the LGBT community and its allies must take to prepare to return to the ballot?

The consultants asked were

• Mark Armour
• Sue Burnside
• Rick Claussen
• Jill Darling
• Dave Fleischer
• Gale Kaufman
• Richie Ross

None of the consultants advised moving forward in 2010 with a ballot measure to legalize gay marriage in California. You can read their full, multiple-page reports by clicking on their names highlighted above.

Here are some excerpts:

Gale Kaufman

Many may feel that the environment is ripe because of the backlash that occurred after Prop 8 passed. I don’t want to discount this because I know the backlash was real. But we need the atmospherics to change quite a bit to secure a victory. By atmospherics I mean the external environment. We need to harness talent, draft the correct messaging, get all players together in one fluid group and ensure that the public is ready and willing and open to our cause before launching a campaign. I don’t see enough evidence of that at this point. If 2012 is the agreed upon target, there is time to
set a much more careful stage, there is the time to put the best possible organization in place and there is the time to do all of the incredible outreach it will take to build and hold the margin we will need.

I would not discount what is happening around us. The victories occurring in other states are a tremendous help to a future California win. Shouldn’t we be organizing financial support for the fight in Maine; sending donations and other resources to make sure that we help secure a victory and learn all the lessons there that can help us moving forward?

Finally, at the moment the California electorate is in a collective horrible mood. The last time I saw polling numbers on “Is California going in the right direction?” the Yes number was under 10%. Going to the ballot with a Yes campaign of any kind right now – while voters have been inundated with initiatives – especially on a subject that they have recently voted on – is a particular risk.

David Fleischer

There are 66 weeks between July 25, 2009 and November 2, 2010.

66 weeks is a very brief time to raise $40-50 million. Based on my experience fundraising, and looking at the remarkable fundraising success of the No on 8 campaign, I think the minimum immediate fundraising goals to be ready for 2010 – to see if we can get on track to raise $40-50 million -- would be $2 million by October 1, 2009, and $5 million by December 1, 2009. This represents roughly the cost of qualifying for the ballot and beginning to set up a campaign. This is much less than the average weekly amount we would need to raise over the 66 weeks ($600-700,000 each week, every week). But it would cover start-up costs and demonstrate some of the breadth of support necessary to assure donors we could get to the level reached in No on 8, and hopefully beyond it.

In most of these ballot measure campaigns on marriage, our community is put in a financially brutal position by our opposition, because they control the timetable. But we control the timetable now. Let’s use that advantage, and return to the ballot when we’re financially ready.

Richie Ross "does the math"

Since the latest research shows 60%-23% support for marriage equality among voters under-30 years of age, how many more of them will be “Likely Voters” in 2012?

In 2008…

170,734 of 18/19-year-olds voted.
189,735 of 20-year-olds voted.
181,363 of 21-year-olds voted.

In 2012, we will have a new batch of 18, 19, 20, and 21-year-olds that will add 515,875 new likely voters. If 60% of them vote with us and half of the “swing” voters join them, we can expect 353,374 NEW supporters among likely voters.

Our net growth (new voters with us minus new voters against us) will be 162,501.

At the same time, records indicate that about 110,000 older voters die each year. In 2012, 440,000 of the 2008 voters will have died. If we again apply the poll to that raw number, our natural opposition will shrink by 101,200 of total likely voters.

Mark Armour

III. The Need for Time to Conduct Outreach and Persuasion
As the Binder/Simon poll shows, with so few voters persuadable, victory in the next initiative will also require the persuasion of soft opponents and “conflicted voters” instead of just undecided voters. That requires a coordinated field and outreach program that reaches hundreds of thousands of voters. In particular, as the Binder/Simon polling found, important targets are moderates, Democrats and Independents, and also Latinos, African-Americans, and Asian Pacific Islanders who are not evangelical/born-again and who attend church once a month or less. Moving conflicted voters
won’t happen overnight, and outreach to ethnic communities will be more successful over a three year period than over an abbreviated one year period.

IV. What needs to be done
So what needs to be done?
1. A decision needs to be made on moving forward on a specific ballot, and a campaign plan and team need to be put in
place.
2. Fundraising must begin for initial outreach and education as well as for the campaign.
3. Outreach to soft, conflicted voters and ethnic communities must begin.
4. Media should be used to educate and reach out to voters in the time before the election. Based on the Binder/Simon polling, messages should show that gay and lesbian couples and their children have the same hopes and dreams as everyone else and that it is unfair to deprive them or their children of dignity, responsibility and security of marriage.

Sue Burnside

• The majority of California voters do not support same sex marriage. No ballot initiative has walked into Election Day without a 50% positive polling number and won in California.
• The California electorate is angry about the budget crisis and worried about the direction the country and state are headed. In this political climate, people tend to vote NO on ballot measures. We have to get a Yes vote!
• Given the national economy, California’s deep recession and the fact that few major donors have agreed to pledge large funds to an immediate rematch, it’s hard to see how we raise the $30-$40 million it would cost to run and win this campaign.
• The Governor’s race will be the top of the ballot in 2010. Some argue that all the Democratic candidates will favor marriage equality. But in a statewide run off in November, the Democrat nominee might not be an outspoken supporter, given that we only won 13 of 58 counties.
• Anti gay-marriage forces can get more people to vote in a low turnout environment than we can. If you look at the voters by age likely to vote in a 2010 election, people over 60 represent 37% of likely voters versus 27% in a 2012 general election. Our strength lies in getting young people to vote – in November 2012 voters under 30 will represent 20% of the electorate but in 2010 they will only represent 7% of the electorate. By 2012 there will be 776,000 new voters under 21 years old added to the voter rolls (our best group). On the other end of the age spectrum, there will be fewer older voters – more than 122,000 voters will die (the opposition’s most reliable voting bloc) Take a look at historic spreadsheet below.
• We would need to be prepared to get on the ballot in just two months (the deadline to submit language for the initiative is September 25, 2009 and have the full 150 days to circulate the petition). Any ballot campaign expert will tell you that having the exact right ballot language is often the difference between winning and losing. With just two months until the deadline for submitting ballot language, we may not have time to develop the strongest possible language.
• The current poll models a 2012 electorate as it stands today, but not fully reflecting where things will be in November 2012. You cannot poll future voters if they are not on the voter file. The 2% increase suggested by the polling is nothing to be laughed at but I believe given the inability to accurately gauge the real number without using the above information (new young voters and dying old voters), the increase would be closer to 4% for a 2012 election.
• Prop 8 lost in Los Angeles, the largest urban base. Our state map looks worse than the map that recalled Governor Gray Davis (Davis got 80% in SF County but we only got 75% -- this trend continues for all urban areas in the state). This highlights that urban areas have more people of color voters and we need to do organizing in order to get a larger percentage of the vote.
  

Rick Claussen

We recommend a multi-year campaign that culminates in an election when the time is right – when the numbers have moved enough to give you some assurance of success.

If you do UNSUCCESSFULLY undertake this issue at the ballot in 2010, this will further erode public support on the issue and make it harder for future efforts to succeed. And rather than looking at a 2012 fight, you may be forced to look at 2014, 2016 or beyond before a ballot victory would become viable. For these reasons, we recommend spending time and resources to lay the groundwork for a successful reversal of Proposition 8 when conditions are right.

Jill Darling

Binder and Simon provided models of their findings based on projections of electorates in a gubernatorial election like 2010 and found marriage equality behind by four points (46% to 50%). In a presidential electorate projection for 2012, voters would split 47% favor to 48% opposed. If we allocate them using the exit poll estimates for late deciders, support for marriage equality could be at 48% right now among a 2010 electorate and 49% among voters in 2012. In other words, support for marriage equality is almost exactly where it was
a year and a half ago no matter how you model it, and opposition remains nearly as strong as it was last November, despite a hard-fought campaign and the emotional and intellectual discussion and media coverage in the aftermath of our loss.

Binder and Simon remind us that their models show what future elections could look like, if nothing other than electorate composition were different than it is now. The researchers pointed out in their Get Engaged presentation materials that other ballot measures and the top-of-ticket races have impact on voter turnout as well as on the composition of the electorate. From my own history of exit and pre-election polling I know that voter turnout
and the composition of the electorate are variables that we can model but cannot truly predict and there are other things that effect elections as well. Few would have foreseen Obama’s candidacy and its effect on the demographics of the electorate, on turnout, or on the issues that were being discussed, for example.

While thinking about this, I wondered what the vote on Proposition 8 might have been in an electorate that looked more like the voters of 2004. So I used demographics from the 2008 exit poll, PPIC’s 2008 December survey of general election voters, and demographics from the 2004 Los Angeles Times exit poll to put together a quick model. It shows that if voter turnout and demographic makeup had been more like it was in 2004 but the vote in
those demographic groups remained the same, support for Proposition 8 could have run two points higher.

The overall summary is that we need to start the work NOW to win marriage equality once and for all, as soon as we can.