Last night I appeared on MSNBC's All In With Chris Hayes to discuss how gay marriage is tying the Republican Party in self-inflicted knots. My bit comes after the 7-minute mark below:
At Fivethirtyeight.com, in a post titled "The GOP May Regret Its Lasting Battle Against Gay Marriage," Harry Enten regresses a bunch of poll numbers and echoes a conclusion I asserted above: "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." Excerpt:
Pew/538.com
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. […]
[L]ook carefully at the chart [to the right]. While gay marriage ranks as the second-most-important issue in predicting whether someone will identify as Republican, it falls to fifth on the list in predicting if someone will call themselves a Democrat.
This may mean that a lot of people who reject the Republican Party because of its opposition to gay marriage aren't lining up with the Democrats either and instead are choosing to be independents. […]
That suggests that there are voters Republicans aren't getting because of gay marriage, and it's why Republicans who have their eye on the general election, like Bush, want to move on from the subject.
Peter Suderman noted Jeb Bush's interesting reaction (and those of many other more withering 2016 candidates) on the day of Obergefell. Reason has also discussed the reactions from Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Ohio Gov. John Kasich, and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.
