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November 08, 2005
Prop 2 headed for passage
With 23% of precincts reporting in, it looks the anti-gay-marriage Proposition 2 is going to pass. It is currently leading by about 77% voting for it. I had actually thought this would happen, but I had hoped it would pass by a smaller margin. We'll see what the rest of the night holds, but I don't expect much change.
Now before some of you on the Democratic side of the aisle paint this as a purely Republican product of hatred, bear in mind that the state is probably at most 61% Republican as evidenced by the 2004 election. (Bush carried the state by 61% to 38%, and as a former governor, he carried the edge of being a favorite son, usually worth about 5%.)
That means that if voter turnout patterns were similar -- and Prop 2 brought people out in droves on each side of the aisle -- then I would conclude that 16 points of that 77% is coming from the Democrats. In other words, it would appear that at least 42% of Texas Democrats voted for the ban. I suspect the number is actually higher, because I know a number of younger Republicans such as myself that voted against the ban, so those more votes had to be coming from the Democrat side.
Now, that's a very fuzzy number since the two sets of voters (2004 vs. 2005) are not necessarily the same, but it is in line with what we saw in other states in 2004 where Democrats voted in favor of state bans on gay marriage in large numbers, between 19% and 65%, at a minimum. [See my 2004 analysis.] I stress that again, those are minimum percentages, assuming that every Republican voted for those bans, which I very much doubt.
As I've said before, I believe this to be an age issue. This was sponsored and supported largely by the older generations, and predominantly opposed by the younger generations. The precincts surrounding UT are apparently rejecting the measure by a 90% to 10% margin. I imagine the retirees in Sun City are doing the opposite.
Have patience, friends, and try not to alienate the Republicans of your own generation. We are not the hateful Nazis you paint us to be.
Politics by Dan at November 8, 2005 09:02 PM
Comments
Prop 2 unfortunately did not bring people out in droves. The turnout was only 6% of registered voters, from what I've heard.
I await the exit polling to see just what the republican/democrat turnout numbers were before making any speculation as to party breakdown.
Posted by: Jonathan Abbey at November 9, 2005 07:59 AM
Alas, turnout was lower than it seemed at first.
However, I do expect that many votes came from the Democratic side, since we know for a fact that that's what happened in 2004.
Posted by: Dan at November 9, 2005 08:21 AM
I don't have the voter turnout by percentage of registered voters, but there were 2,240,705 votes cast in the Proposition 2 ballot with 99% precincts reporting. If that were only 6% of registered voters, then that would require over 37 million registered voters in the state of Texas. Considering that the state population is in the 22 to 23 million range, I'd put that number somewhat lower. Even amongst the registered voters, a certain percentage is registered only because they have a driver's license. They never vote and never intend to vote. [As a side note, I have a viscerally negative reaction to these people.] So, these days looking at the numbers of registered voters for computing turnout is often a poor analyitical tool.
Perhaps more telling is that this number of votes is about 30% the number cast in the 2004 Presidential election in Texas (about 7.4 millin). I'm not enough of a statistician to say what that does to my margin of error, especially since both samples were self-selecting.
Still, the results are in line with what I saw in 2004, so I don't expect to see much difference in any exit polling. Even then, exit polling recently proved to be not all that accurate either.
Posted by: Dan at November 9, 2005 11:44 AM