Marriage Amendment Post-Mortem

As everyone knows by now, the misnamed "marriage amendment" (it's actually a ban on civil unions) passed. CNN demographic survey data as regards the amendment voters reveals few surprises: voters under age 30, college educated voters, and those who attend church only occasionally or not at all were most likely to vote "no." Elderly voters, those with high school educations or less, and frequent church goers were most likely to vote "yes."

The passage of the amendment shows how irrelevant the mainstream, corporate press editorial pages have become. Corporate newspapers in virtually every major city came out against the amendment, yet that opposition along with the well-funded "A Fair Wisconsin Votes No" drive of the organization Fair Wisconsin came up short. Why?

We know that newspaper readership is down and that even those who continue to read them no longer look to the editorial page for guidance. So scratch that as a factor.

I suspect when all the votes are in we will find that the 18-30 year old vote, while perhaps higher this year than expected, still was not close to the numbers turned out by the over-50 year old group. Fair Wisconsin spent a great deal of time and resources trying to mobilize the youth vote, and I certainly don't want to second guess them, but in hindsight maybe a stronger appeal was needed for the likely voters. Fair Wisconsin srupulously did not want to debate the theology of marriage--a strategy which I thought would make sense IF the majority of elderly voters were not also religious in some way. But again, I don't want to second guess especially since activists in other states HAVE debated the theology and lost by even bigger margins than what we saw in Wisconsin.

The good news is that the amendment created thousands of new social justice activists around the state. At UW Oshkosh this semester I have met scores of students who never were interested in politics until they became mobilized by this issue. In exploiting a wedge issue to help Mark Green in the short term, the Republicans may have ended doing much long term damage to themselves.