POLL: 49% Of Oregon Voters Would Repeal Marriage Equality Ban

A recent poll of 500 Oregon voters asked the question "Do you favor or oppose changing the Oregon constitution to allow same-sex marriage in the state?" and 49% of voters say they Favor doing so and 42% say they Oppose doing it. The margin of error is somewhere between ±2.6% and ±4.4%.

This is seen as reasonably good news (at least the good guys are ahead) but is a somewhat odd result since we know that a majority of Americans nationwide support marriage equality and that according to a geographical analysis by UCLA Law School's Williams Institute, there are twelve states in which marriage equality support is a majority and  Oregon is one of them, at 54% (with the actual number being somewhere between 49% and 58%).

This is good news for a potential ballot measure which is expected to be presented to voters in the November 2014 election that would repeal the constitutional amendment banning marriage equality passed in November 2004.

hat/tip to TowleRoad

Black Voter Turnout Won 2012 Election For Obama

A new report analyzing voter turnout in 2012 confirms that well-publicized efforts by Republicans to suppress voting by minorities (a.k.a. the GOP War on Voting) resulted in record Black turnout, handing the election to President Obama even though overall voter turnout was down over 2008 (and 2004). In fact, the most dramatic finding in the report is that turnout by Black voters surpassed turnout by White voters for the first time ever. For the second presidential election in a row, the Black percentage of the presidential vote (13%) exceeded the Black percentage of the electorate (12%).

This is the key excerpt from the Associated Press story:

Romney would have erased Obama's nearly 5 million-vote victory margin and narrowly won the popular vote if voters had turned out as they did in 2004, according to Frey's analysis. Then, white turnout was slightly higher and black voting lower.

More significantly, the battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida and Colorado would have tipped in favor of Romney, handing him the presidency if the outcome of other states remained the same.

There is a  lot of interesting information in the article for both Democrats and Republicans. First, the article notes that only only political party (Republicans) have managed to win the presidency three consecutive times in the last 60 years (1980, 1984, 1988) so that Democrats should not be confident about 2016. It also notes that Romney was a particular weak candidates, failing to energize white voters while Obama successfully energized black voters. The much vaunted Latino vote is still  only a potential factor at the presidential level, with Latino voters making up 17% of the electorate but only 11% of the vote. This could change sooner rather than later, depending on how immigration reform ends up impacting the citizenship status of the millions of undocumented immigrants of Hispanic descent living in the United States.

However my favorite oart of the story is this description of Mitt Romney by an African American voter from Cleveland, Ohio:

"A white Mormon swimming in money with offshore accounts buying up companies and laying off their employees just doesn't quite fit my idea of a president," she said. "Bottom line, Romney was not someone I was willing to trust with my future."

And that is a summation of the 2012 Republican presidential candidate in a nutshell: "a white mormon swimming in money with offshore accounts buying up companies and laying off their employees." David Axelrod must be very proud!

Outed Former RNC Chair Ken Mehlman Comes Out

Ken Mehlman, 44, a longtime Republican political operative, protege of the truly odious Lee Atwater and former chair of the Republican National Committee, Political Director in the George W. Bush White House and campaign manager of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election effort has finally acknowledged his homosexuality publicly, after being outed by Mike Rogers years ago and in his excellent Outrage (2009) documentary, which just happens to be up for an Emmy award this weekend September 19th.

The impetus for Melhman's revelation (by Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic) was his decision to become involved in a huge fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights, the sponsors of the Olson-Boies federal lawsuit against Proposition 8.

The reactions to Mehlman's announcement, especially from the LGBT community have generally been vitriolic, with Joe.My.God titling his post "Repulsive Anti-Gay Quisling Homophobic Scumbag Asshat Closeted Former RNC Chair Ken Mehlman Has Come Out" while Dustin Lance Black posted to facebook that it was "an incredible coup for AFER."

I find my thoughts closer to Joe's than Dustin's, which is why I have created the tag "quislings" especially for this occasion. I think Equality California's executive director Geoff Kors gets pretty close to the right response with:

"One of the things I sincerely hope Ken Mehlman has done or will do is to explain to George W. Bush how denying LGBT people equality causes real harm and how the GOP's anti-equality platform and campaigns lead to teen suicides and hate crimes. I hope he explains how bigotry impacted him and that he has asked George W Bush to join his wife Laura in supporting marriage equality. If he can convince Bush to publicly change his position that would be powerful. And I hope he shares with the public how the GOP used animus towards gay people to pass anti-marriage state constitutional amendments, as that will bolster the federal Prop 8 case. What he does to undo the damage he caused can be a part of his legacy and working with AFER to help overturn Prop 8 is a good start. We all have to hope he goes all out and proves he is a talented political strategist -- this time on the side of equality."

What do you think?