Gay Voters Were Essential To Obama Winning The Popular Vote

Click image to enlarge

This blog has looked at this issue before, but now an new survey puts data behind the claims and conjectures that the LGBT vote likely put Barack Obama back in the White House and guaranteed that Mitt Romney would go down to defeat.   HRC has data that shows that the LGBT vote played a significant role in putting Obama over the top in terms of the popular vote.  And as previously noted, in states like Ohio, the LGBT vote allowed Obama to claim that state's electoral votes.  Here is some of the data from HRC:

HRC is releasing today the results of a post-election poll that shows a cultural sea-change on LGBT equality reflected in voters’ attitudes.

In 2004, LGBT issues – and marriage in particular – were used as wedge issues to drive conservative turnout, but 2012 is remarkable in that the opposite has happened. In only eight years, marriage has gone from a wedge for the right, to a motivator for progressives, youth and even independents.

Among the findings in the poll conducted for HRC by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research:

• Obama voters were twice as likely to say that the marriage issue was important to their vote (42 percent) than Romney voters (23 percent)
  • However, in an open ended question where voters were asked the most important reason to vote against the President’s re-election, only 2 percent cited "gay marriage."
• Marriage equality supporters have more intensity than marriage equality opponents:
  • ​Among supporters of marriage equality, 40 percent said the issue was important to them compared to 33 percent among opponents of marriage equality
• There is no evidence that this issue mobilized base Republican voters:
  • ​There are more Romney voters that support marriage equality (27 percent) than Obama voters that oppose marriage equality (18 percent)

 The full memo on the survey is available at: www.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/Election2012_memo.pdf