Sunday, April 5, 2009

When will your state VOTE FOR gay marriage?

From the brilliant mind of Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight.com, we have a regression model predicting the likelihood of a state voting to legalize (or to not illegalize, rather) gay marriage. Good news? By 2012, almost have the states in the union, based on polling trends, would vote in favor of equality. Bad news? By 2012, Iowa would lose that fight 50.6 to 49.4.

2012 is the very earliest a constitutional amendment could go to the voters in Iowa to overturn the Supreme Court's decision to legalize marriage.

From his post, here is the breakdown:
2009 (now)
Vermont
New Hampshire
Massachusetts
Maine
Rhode Island
Connecticut
Nevada*
Washington
Alaska*
New York
Oregon*

2010
California*
Hawaii
Montana*
New Jersey
Colorado*

2011
Wyoming
Delaware
Idaho*
Arizona*

2012
Wisconsin*
Pennsylvania
Maryland
Illinois

2013
Michigan*
Minnesota
Iowa
Ohio*
Utah*
Florida*

2014
New Mexico
North Dakota*
Nebraska*
South Dakota*

2015
Indiana
Virginia*
West Virginia
Kansas*

2016
Missouri*

2018
Texas*

2019
North Carolina
Louisiana*
Georgia*

2020
Kentucky*

2021
South Carolina*
Oklahoma*

2022
Tennessee*
Arkansas*

2023
Alabama*

2024
Mississippi*
As a note, Ohio's equal marriage ban -- Issue 1 in 2004 -- only passed by 55-45 or something similar. That's really close for Ohio.

Of equal importance, perhaps more, he makes this comment about the data:
All of the other variables that I looked at -- race, education levels, party registration, etc. -- either did not appear to matter at all, or became redundant once we accounted for religiosity. Nor does it appear to make a significant difference whether the ban affected marriage only, or both marriage and civil unions.
Did you hear that? The only major variable that matters is religion. I'm sure there's a point there somewhere.

1 comment:

Wolfie said...

I peronally think Kentucky will be before Ohio