California Activists Not Going to Bother Overturning Prop 8 Next Year

Last year, a well-funded, well-coordinated campaign to ban gay marriage in California won by a slim margin, partly because opponents forgot to organize and campaign until after the vote. Now they are not going to bother trying again next year.

Why? Because since last year's vote, in the absence of a campaign of any kind, polling on gay marriage hasn't shifted. So it's not even worth it to try to overturn the ban in 2010, gay marriage inactivists say. After all, they all assumed Prop 8 would just fail, on its own, because it's California, and then it passed, because of the Mormons and the Blacks and the Olds! It passed by a whopping 4 points (less than one million people), so let's just wait until 2012.

Marc Solomon, marriage director for Equality California, said he spent June and early July asking the opinions of nearly two dozen California political consultants and pollsters and had been surprised by the almost unanimous opinion that a 2010 race was a bad idea.

"I expected having watched the protests and the real pain that the L.G.B.T. community had experienced that there would be some real measurable remorse in the electorate," Mr. Solomon said, referring to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. "But if you look at the poll numbers since November, they really haven't moved at all."

So. Obviously you can't fundraise without an organization, and you don't want to build an organization until you think you might win, and you can't win when no one is campaigning to change anyone's mind, and so it's best to just WAIT IT OUT. The olds will die, eventually! Especially once we pass OBAMACARE.

And gee, you may be saying, wasn't one of the problems, last year, that gay marriage advocates waited too long to actually reach out to voters, allowing the issue to be framed by fear-mongering opponents? Yes, which is why they mustn't make that mistake again, by trying to win an election in 2010.