OutRight

by Dale Carpenter

SURVEY SAYS?

The polls won’t bring us gay marriage

Nationally, support for gay marriage now stands at about 40 percent. Opposition has dropped to somewhere in the low- to mid-50s. Some polls in individual states, like Massachusetts, actually show that a slight majority supports it. Even 10 years ago none of this would have been imaginable.

So all this means we will thwart any attempt to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriages, right? After all, amending the Constitution would require a super-majority that opponents of gay marriage no longer have. And soon we’ll get a state legislature somewhere—Massachusetts perhaps—to adopt full-fledged gay marriages.

Don’t count on it. Polls can be deceiving, and by themselves are an unreliable base for political power. In this case they are probably both.

Polls are subject to error and bias. One error involves sampling from a population that doesn’t reflect the relevant opinion group. For example, a polling firm may choose respondents based on expectation that Democrats and Republicans will vote in roughly equal numbers. But what if many more Democrats than expected actually vote? The poll will be wrong.

Bias can creep in through the sequencing of questions. If you ask Americans in a single question whether they approve of George Bush’s performance as president, they are likely to give you more positive responses than if you first ask them questions that remind them of problems in the economy and in Iraq.

The way a question is phrased can also skew answers. If you ask, “Do you believe a woman should be able to make her own decision about whether to terminate her pregnancy free of government interference?” you will get a very different response than if you ask, “Do you think a woman should be allowed to kill her unborn child?” Yet it’s the same question.

No matter how you ask the question, however, respondents sometimes give answers that do not reveal their true feelings. Rather, they give the “right” answer—that is, the answer they think they should give. This is especially true on sensitive social issues that deal with race and human sexuality.

In the case of gay marriage, we encounter all three problems—sampling error, question bias, and answer bias. To start, what is the relevant group to survey? All adults? Those likely to vote in the next general election? Those likely to vote in a referendum?

There can be bias, too, in the questioning. Is a respondent’s opinion of gay marriage to be asked after other questions calling attention to the problems unmarried gay couples face? After questions regarding the decline of moral values? Out of the blue, with no context?

The biggest problem in polling on gay marriage is answer bias. Time after time, experience shows that polls underestimate the voting public’s opposition to gay marriage.

A textbook example is the California experience regarding a 2000 initiative to ban gay marriage. On the eve of the vote, a poll showed only 51 percent of Californians opposed gay marriage. In the actual vote, 61 percent opposed it. And this was in a relatively gay-friendly state.

What happened? It appears citizens told pollsters what they thought they should say, not what they actually believed. Nobody wants to be thought a bigot. But get them in the privacy of the ballot box, and inhibitions vanish. Whatever the polls say, actual public feeling on gay marriage is likely to be more hostile.

Even if we could get answers that truly reflected what Americans think on the issue of gay marriage, however, that would still not translate into automatic political power proportionate to the response in the polls. The kind of public opinion that fuels actual power depends not just on raw numerical support or opposition, but on the intensity of that support or opposition.

People who feel strongly about a subject are likely to contribute their money and time to fighting for their views. They are likely to vote based on a candidate’s stand on that subject, to the exclusion of other issues.

There are a few people, mostly gay people, who strongly favor gay marriage. But that 40 percent of the public now claiming to support gay marriage includes a large number of people who unreflectively oppose all discrimination, yet haven’t given the specific issue much thought. This group includes some who will revert to opposition, given the least reason to do so, and many who favor gay marriage, but consider it rather unimportant in their own lives.

On the other hand, among the rest of the public who oppose gay marriage is a large segment of religious and other voters who abhor even the thought of gay unions. They will give money to fight it. They will walk precincts, make phone calls, and lick envelopes. They will vote. They have intensity.

Politicians know all this. That’s why they can safely oppose gay marriage even when their constituents, according to polls, are roughly divided on the subject. That’s why not one serious Democratic presidential contender supports gay marriage. That’s why the Republicans may make it an issue in the 2004 campaign. That’s why, after a court victory in Massachusetts or some other state whips opposition into a frenzy, we could lose a battle over a constitutional amendment.

The recent polls are headed in the right direction. But they won’t save us when it counts.

Writing from the conservative end of the spectrum, Dale Carpenter began his column for OutSmart in 1994, when he lived in Houston. Now residing in Minneapolis, Carpenter is a University of Minnesota Law School professor.

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