|
By Trevor |
A veeeeeeeeery interesting and useful visualization (click it to enlarge) of a set of public opinion polls fromFiveThirtyEight. Here's the background:
Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips put together a dataset using national opinion polls from 1994 through 2009 and analyzed several different opinion questions on gay rights. Here I'm going to talk about their estimates of state-by-state trends in support for gay marriage. In the past fifteen years, gay marriage has increased in popularity in all fifty states. No news there, but what was a surprise to me is where the largest changes have occurred. The popularity of gay marriage has increased fastest in the states where gay rights were already relatively popular in the 1990s. In 1995, support for gay marriage exceeded 30% in only six states: New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, and Vermont. In these states, support for gay marriage has increased by an average of almost 20 percentage points. In contrast, support has increased by less than 10 percentage points in the six states that in 1995 were most anti-gay-marriage--Utah, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Idaho.
Not surprisingly, Utah is at the bottom of the barrel. I always wonder if the Mormons publicly trash gay marriage so much because they want to prove to America that they *really* believe in monogamous marriage. Mormons are in my mind a denigrated minority religious group in the United States, and their church's history of practicing bigamy is near the top of the list of reasons Americans are so suspicious of them. So it seems to me that gay marriage for them is a kind of whipping boy to prove to the rest of Americans that they're just as "normal" when it comes to relationships as any other red-blooded American. In any case, I think Utah is going to require a special kind of political strategy different from all the other states (whereas I think other states can be assessed almost regionally).
Other states of interest: Curious how far West Virginia has come in relation to the other states in its area, no? And look at New Jersey and Oregon! What's happened in these states that's so different from others? Examining that might provide some useful fodder for future campaigns in rather dismal-looking states like Arkansas and South Carolina.
|