A look at public opinion on same-sex marriage and what drives party affiliation suggests that Cruz, Walker and the other candidates on the right may be risking the party’s appeal in the general election. The Republican Party’s opposition to same-sex marriage is one of the top positions that may have kept voters from identifying with and potentially voting for the GOP.
Polling generally suggests that same-sex marriage is not a top issue for most voters. A February
CNN/ORC survey found that just 17 percent of Americans said the issue of gay marriage would be “extremely important” in choosing a candidate to support for president — the lowest of any of nine issues tested.
But digging deeper provides a different perspective. Beyond the importance voters place upon it directly, gay marriage may have symbolic power because of the messages it sends to voters about the parties.
Here’s how to decode the numbers. Positive values mean that support for that issue predicts a greater likelihood of affiliating with the party. Support for gun rights, for example, is predictive of a greater likelihood of identifying as Republican. The larger the coefficient, the more influence the issue has. Negative values, conversely, predict less likelihood of supporting the party.
In the Republican column, the coefficient for gay marriage is large and negative, meaning that supporting it substantially reduces the likelihood that someone will identify as Republican. In fact, based on the regressions, the only variable more predictive of Republican identification is whether a person believes health care coverage is the government’s responsibility. Gay marriage is more important than classic “wedge issues” like guns or abortion in predicting whether someone identifies as a Republican.
Let’s be clear about what these results mean. What they say is that if I meet you at a picnic and you tell me that you support gay marriage, that gives me a lot of information about whether you’re a Republican — more than almost any other attitudinal question I might ask you.
if you jerkoffs have moved on, why do you all keep responding to our disapproval of this abomination of you qweers butt fucking each other, that has in the past always been done without a marriage license ?
