The Commonwealth Coalition, who is leading the fight to defeat the Marshall Newman amendment, today issued a press release and poll memo on its latest polling results. The entire press release is available on the Equality Loudoun website and the poll memo is available here. The good news is that support for the amendment is below 50% of the likely voters polled.
Last year’s polling of registered voters (as opposed to likely voters) on a potential amendment banning gay marriage (since the official language of the amendment had not been decided upon) showed that 54% supported such a ban. The broadening of the amendment beyond gay marriage is noted as the reason for the erosion of support.
While the poll is indicative of how people feel today, we have a long way to go to November. Those of us voting NO have to continue to work hard to get people to read the entire amendment and see the unintended consequences of permitting such language to be added to the Virginia constitution. The text of the amendment appears in my sidebar and will remain there until Election Day.
Good news, indeed. Defeating the amendment is possible. Let’s all get to work!
UPDATE: Kenton has great pics of the numbers.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Loudoun, with a “U”. Not Loudon. Sorry, but that little misspelling bugs me. Yes, keep working hard. This is good news.
Spell-checker didn’t catch that – fixed 😉
Thanks for the info, but honestly, no one should read into the comparative results.
They changed the sample methodology. It’s almost guaranteed that they’d get different results, and it doesn’t mean there’s an erosion of support. You should know that, Vivian.
If both polls tested likelies, or both tested registered, then you’d have something. But to change the sample and change the question, and to compare it to a previous poll and think you’ve accomplished anything is completely a misuse of statistical reliability.
Besides, the 2002 sales tax referendum was passing in September, and it lost 62-38.
Neat reading, though, but that’s about all it is.
I think I was clear, as is the poll memo, that the question and the sample had been changed. The most important piece of this is that amendment support is below 50%. And,as I said, there is a long way to go to November.
Interesting that amendment proponents are trying to downplay the significance of this poll by saying it must be a push poll, the sample methodology is flawed, it doesn’t necessarily reflect what will happen on election day, yadda yadda yadda.
You would think that they would want to use it to rally the somewhat uninspired troops, who may or not believe that this will be a cakewalk, and who may or may not believe that this amendment is advisable or neccessary.
I wonder what that’s about. It suggests to me that they are counting, in large part, on fair minded people assuming that defeating the amendment is a lost cause and not worth investing effort in.
That would explain the attempt to obfuscate the one salient fact; That support for the amendment is well under 50%. It doesn’t really matter what the difference is between registered voters and likely voters, or how much support has eroded since last year. What matters is that, among likely voters who have read the entire text of the amendment, support is well under 50%. What that tells us is really the only thing that matters. If we do the work – and it’s just a quantitative problem – of making sure that voters READ THE WHOLE THING, we will win.
If we do that, we will win. The rest is noise.
Another poll has come out, an independent one. Shows 56% support. And you wondered why I thought this one was suspect?
The M-D poll didn’t poll the entire amendment.