Backers see turnaround in gay-marriage votes

— In the first elections to be held since President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party endorsed gay marriage, supporters of same-sex nuptials notched victories in ballot measures in three states and narrowly led in a fourth, reversing a 14-year-long string of voter setbacks.

Despite opponents’ predictions of “doom and gloom,” Chad Griffin, an Arkadelphia native and president of Human Rights Campaign, a Washingtonbased homosexual-advocacy group, said Obama’s support of the issue was a positive for the Democratic nominee and his party.

“They said it would ruin the president’s chances for re-election,” he said. “The opposite turned out to be true.”

Conservative Christians, leading opponents of the ballot measures, blamed national Republican leaders and Republican nominee Mitt Romney for not pushing harder to rally opposition to same-sex marriage.

“We did our job,” said Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a conservative Christian group. “We can’t do the Republican Party’s job for them. We can’t do the candidate’s job for him.”

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who ran for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, downplayed the results.

He said that in an election that was a “good day” for liberals, it was no surprise that gay-marriage initiatives won in states that are historically Democratic.

“It didn’t happen in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia or Nebraska,” he said.

“It’s hardly indicative of a landslide,” on the issue, he said.

Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister, predicted conservative Christians will remain steadfast in opposing a redefinition of marriage — regardless of vote totals and poll results.

“It’s not about the politics of it,” he said. “Most of us are traditionalists. We have a biblical worldview.”

On Tuesday, voters in Maine and Maryland approved ballot measures making gay marriage legal. As votes on a similar measure in Washington were being counted Wednesday, supporters were confident of another victory there. And in Minnesota, voters blocked a proposed state constitutional amendment against gay marriage.

In addition to the ballot measures, Wisconsin voters sent Democrat Tammy Baldwin to the Senate, making her the first openly gay candidate to be elected to the upper chamber. And several homosexual or bisexual House members were elected, including U.S. Rep.-elect Mark Pocan, D-Wis.; U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo.; Rep.-elect Mark Takano, D-Calif.; Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I.; and Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat from Arizona who is bisexual, had not been declared the victor in her race Wednesday evening as officials continued to count votes.

This fall, Huckabee took part in a $500,000 effort the National Organization for Marriage called the “largest mobilization of traditional marriage voters in history.”

The former Arkansas governor and other advocates, including Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio and evangelical Christian leader James Dobson, recorded robocalls to voters in Maine, Maryland, Washington, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

But they faced well-funded opposition.

Griffin said the Human Rights Campaign spent about $20 million supporting Obama, the gay-marriage ballot measures and candidates who support homosexual rights.

He said Huckabee’s characterization of the states where the group scored victories as liberal was “laughable,” and added that in Maryland, Minnesota and Washington, the ballot initiatives were filed by anti-gay marriage groups.

“They don’t have a single victory they can point to [in 2012],” he said.

Before Tuesday’s ballot measures, gay-marriage supporters had lost more than 30 ballot initiatives, including a defeat in Arkansas in 2004 when voters passed an amendment to the state constitution that banned samesex nuptials.

The result, according to Jonathan Rauch, guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, a liberal research organization in Washington, was “the most perfect record of failure in American politics.”

Rauch, in a research note Wednesday, predicted that social conservatives will continue to treat opposition to gay marriage as a litmus test, while Democrats will deepen their support.

The result, he said, is that Republicans will be unable to attract younger and more moderate voters.

“Gay marriage is mainstream and will never return to the backwaters,” he wrote.

Some conservative leaders disagreed.

Even though Republican political action committees such as American Crossroads, a fundraising group associated with former President George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into political contests, they didn’t focus enough on social issues including same-sex marriage, said Brent Bozell, chairman of ForAmerica, a conservative advocacy group in Virginia.

“I take my hat off to the Democrats,” he said. “They came ready for a fight. They didn’t back down one bit when it came to their perspective on social issues. The question is ‘Where were the Republicans? Why didn’t Republicans show up to the battle?’”

“Had Karl Rove spent 38 cents [to oppose same-sex marriage] of his $700 million maybe there would have been a difference,” he said.

American Crossroads, which focused heavily on fiscal issues and America’s standing abroad, spent $105 million during the 2012 election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission reports tabulated by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington group that tracks money in politics.

Exit polls and dozens of pre-election surveys showed that a majority of weekly churchgoers — especially white evangelicals — favored Romney, while those attending infrequently or not at all heavily supported Obama.

Reed, the chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said conservative Christians mobilized for Republican candidates like never before, but they were ultimately unsuccessful.

His group sent out 24 million mailers, made 21 million phone calls, fired off 18 million text messages and distributed 30 million voter guides that targeted voters in swing states.

The same-sex marriage victories came in “blue” states that are traditionally Democratic, Reed said.

None of these states has supported a Republican presidential nominee since the 1980s.

He said pro-gay marriage groups in those states outspent opponents 8-to-1 in those fights, where they “carpet bombed” the airwaves with ads.

But he said that Obama’s embrace of same-sex marriage this summer and its inclusion in the Democratic Party’s platform in September has helped make acceptance of gay marriage a mainstream viewpoint.

“The politics have changed,” he said.

While he said Obama’s support of same-sex marriage had likely energized Democratic voters, the president’s support also fired up opponents.

The result was that voters were “even-steven” on the issue, he said.

As they regroup, Reed said Republicans should listen to the socially conservative wing of the party and try to score gains among Hispanic voters — a heavily Catholic group — by stressing opposition to gay marriage and abortion.

Reed characterized Romney as a “midwife” between Reagan-Bush-era Republicans and a new generation of party leaders who would be younger and include more women and Hispanics who, he said, tended to attend church more regularly and held more socially conservative positions on abortion and gay marriage.

“We have to do a better job of not looking like your daddy’s religious right,” he said.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/08/2012

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