Justin Ewers, U.S. News & World Report
- The first major post-election poll on the outcome of Proposition 8 finds that huge majorities of Republicans, evangelicals, and older voters were responsible for passing the initiative banning same-sex marriage in California. Voters were most sharply divided not by race, as some political pundits have suggested, but by income level and education, the poll finds, and the measure’s passage was not due to the historic turnout of black voters who supported Barack Obama.
According to exit polls, 70 percent of African-Americans said they voted yes on Proposition 8, which passed with 52 percent of the vote. Many political commentators have contended that socially conservative blacks were the swing votes that sealed the measure’s fate. Some observers found it ironic that while an African-American was finally winning the presidency, his strongest supporters appeared to be torpedoing the rights of another historically persecuted minority group. “It was the black vote that voted down gay marriage,” Bill O’Reilly said almost gleefully on Fox News.
The poll released today by the Public Policy Institute of California, though, finds that Prop 8’s strongest support came not from African-Americans but from white conservatives, born-again Christians, and low-income voters. Party affiliation, age, and religion played a far greater role in determining the measure’s final outcome than race, the poll finds. More than 3 in 4 Republicans voted to ban same-sex marriage in the state, as did 85 percent of evangelical voters. Only 43 percent of all voters between the ages of 18 and 34 supported the ban, while 56 percent of those over 55 did.
