Nate Silver Declares Marriage Equality Opponents In Minority

Good news! Polling guru Nate Silver has crunched the latest poll numbers (which I posted about yesterday) and has announced that he is confident that opposition to marriage equality is no longer a majority position. that fact is reflected in the graphic displayed above. It's still a bit too soon to say whether support for marriage equality is a majority or even plurality position thanks to the margin of error in the polls but the trend lines are VERY clear.

Nate ends his post at The New York Times with a cautionary note to Republicans:

But Republican candidates, who have placed less emphasis on gay marriage in recent years, probably cannot expect their opposition to it to be a net electoral positive for them except in select circumstances. If support for gay marriage were to continue accelerating as fast as it has in the past two years, supporters would outnumber opponents roughly 56-40 in the general population by November 2012. 

Past trends, of course, are no guarantee of future ones, and it’s always possible that the momentum toward increasing support for gay marriage could flatten out or even reverse itself. 

But this does put Republicans in a tricky position. Their traditional position on gay marriage is becoming less popular. But to the extent they disengage from the issue, they may lose even more ground. One way to read the trends of the past few years is that we have passed an inflection point wherein it is no longer politically advantageous for candidates to oppose same-sex marriage, which in turn softens opposition to it among the general public, creating a sort of feedback loop and accelerating the trend.

It should be interesting to see how heterosexual supremacists who are opposed to marriage equality, especially Republican presidential contenders, deal with these poll results, especially since the first two primary states, New Hampshire and Iowa, both have legalized marriage equality.