People are probably going to fixate on the hard numbers in this latest poll on marriage equality from the LA Times, showing the constitutional amendment passing by 54-35.  However, there are a few additional items to consider.

• We all know that initiatives need to be well ahead to start before the advertising ramps up and the No side chips away at the lead.  This poll would traditionally signal an initiative in the danger zone.  However, the initial polls for Prop. 22 in 2000 were at 58%, and it rose to 61% by election day.  Opinions may be fairly hardened on this one.

• In the internals, however, there is much good news for marriage equality advocates.  

More than half of Californians said gay relationships were not morally wrong, that they would not degrade heterosexual marriages and that all that mattered was that a relationship be loving and committed, regardless of gender.

That’s really, really good news.  54% say same-sex relationships are not morally wrong, and 59% say that “as long as the two love each other, it doesn’t matter” what gender the two people are.  It suggests that the only hurdle is the terminology of “gay marriage,” based on lingering tradition.  I think that can be cleared to a degree.

• There’s more confirmation that this is generational.

Overall, the proportion of Californians who back either gay marriage or civil unions for same-sex couples has remained fairly constant over the years. But the generational schism is pronounced. Those under 45 were less likely to favor a constitutional amendment than their elders and were more supportive of the court’s decision to overturn the state’s current ban on gay marriage. They also disagreed more strongly than their elders with the notion that gay relationships threatened traditional marriage.

Considering that the likely Presidential nominee is poised to bring Americans under 45 to the polls in record numbers, it’s certainly better to be on the side that appeals to them.

• If Arnold’s opposition to the measure is publicized, which is likely, that does seem to change minds:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has vetoed two bills sanctioning gay marriage, has said that he respects the court’s decision and that he will not support a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Californians were split on his stance, with 45% agreeing and 46% disagreeing.

I think this is a pretty good place to be considering the circumstances.  The marriage equality movement has powerful advocates and the weight of justice and fairness on their side.  It’s whether enough people have gotten used to the concept by November.  I think the poll shows that’s very possible.

The latest PPIC poll, a pretty decent one in California, has Barack Obama leading John McCain by 17 points, 54-37.  It’s a large sample size including 2003 Californians and 1086 likely voters, so it’s a fairly robust poll amongst age groups and ethnicities.  And if this data point is correct, Barack Obama looks VERY strong for November.

According to the poll, Obama leads McCain among Hispanics 69-20.

That’s a “game over” type of number if it holds.

Cast your memory back to the February primaries, and you may remember that Obama’s problem area was not white working-class voters, as they have been so eloquently called, but Hispanics.  Much ink was spilled over how Obama couldn’t connect with them, how there was all this antipathy between the black and brown communities, and it did manifest itself in the voting, at least in California.  Hillary Clinton cleaned up in the heavily Hispanic areas in Southern California.  In fact, it made up very nearly all of her delegate and popular vote win in the state.  She had the backing of the Latino establishment and worked them extremely hard to get out the vote, which they did in big numbers.

I don’t think anybody expected Obama to rebound among these voters this strongly, this soon.  But his favorables among Hispanics are right in line with his share of the vote over McCain, at 69%.

It’s one poll and it’s one data point.  But extrapolate it out.  The legendary figure is that Hispanics voted 44% for Bush in 2004.  That’s probably not true – it was probably around 39%.  However, that’s substantially larger than 20% – and remember that Bush only won by 3 points, and Hispanic voters may be a slightly higher share of the electorate this year.

Again, it’s one point in one poll, but if California’s Hispanics voted at similar rates to the rest of the country’s, then Colorado would be done, New Mexico would be done, Nevada would be close to done, Arizona would be in play, Texas would be in play, North Carolina and Georgia (with growing Hispanic regions) would be in play… you get the picture.  Rove’s “permanent Republican majority” relied on chipping away at a chunk of Hispanic voters while maintaining the white vote and building the coalition.  The fearmongering and demagoguery over immigration reform, even though McCain nominally supported it (until the primary), has tarnished the Republican brand significantly among this subgroup.  There’s no other explanation for these numbers.

If John McCain gets 20-25% of the Hispanic vote he can’t win the election.  The highest that Kerry ever polled among Hispanics was 59-31.  This is ten points below what Obama’s polling in California.  This is a bigger lead than Democrats had in 2006 among Hispanics.

I think it’s kind of a big deal.

Immediately after the 2004 presidential election results came in many political analysts floated the notion that the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling that required the state to enact marriage equality was responsible for George Bush’s re-election.  The hypothesis was that the anti-marriage equality initiatives on the ballot energized the right to turnout and they helped push Bush over the top.  That theory was roundly rejected by the actual exit polling data.  Unfortunately that myth still lives on and is influencing political analysis to this day.  Today it appeared in Peter Schrag’s column in the Bee, which was picked up by Boi from Troy and subsequently linked by Marc Ambinder in the Atlantic.

Given its hot-button nature in an election season, there must be a lot of Democrats, from the presidential candidates down, who are hoping that the court follows Jerry Brown’s pleadings. To this day, a lot of people believe that the 2003 decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Court striking down that state’s ban on same-sex marriages was a major factor in the defeat of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.

Schrag really needs a phrase in there that recognizes that while people continue to believe that myth, it has been disproved.  It is something the bloggers, particularly kos harped about, but did not make it very far into the mainstream, despite the numerical evidence.

In that decision, the Massachusetts court held that that “the right to marry means little if it does not include the right to marry the person of one’s choice.”

The ban, the court found, “works a deep and scarring hardship” on same-sex families “for no rational reason.”

The backlash to a similar California ruling would make the reaction to the Massachusetts ruling seem mild.

Why?  Why would California’s reaction be any larger than Massachusetts?  The state’s electorate has been moving slowly toward support for marriage equality.  I suspect that a poll conducted now would show opposition below 50%.  The voters in this state are more likely to support marriage equality now than at any point in the past.  There has been a great deal of positive movement in the past few years, particularly as the Milenials come of voting age.

If indeed the court does rule that the state constitution requires that all persons be treated equally, then we will see an attempt by the right-wing to put an initiative on the ballot to amend the constitution in a way that the Courts cannot overrule.  That would be a big huge fight.  However, if 2004 is any guide, it would not effect the presidential election in any measurable way.

As for election news in California, the final two polls have been wildly divergent.  SurveyUSA shows a 10-point Clinton lead, while Reuters/Zogby has a 13-point Obama lead.  The final Field Poll (the gold standard, as everyone knows) went with a one-point lead to Obama two-point lead to Clinton, almost exactly in the middle.

Of course, this only tells part of the story, as Marc Ambinder picked up on my caveat that the district-level delegate system will skew the results, particularly in those even-numbered districts, where a high bar is needed to be scaled to get anything beyond an even split of delegates.  And if you expect an early answer about them, think again:

So much for having a hard delegate count on Super Tuesday, we’re hearing that CA Dems won’t have final delegate tally ready until Friday.

Debra Bowen’s mantra has been that she’d rather get the count right than get it fast, so everyone’s going to have to wait.  I think it’s a small price to pay for voting with a paper ballot.  By the way, DTS voters, fill that bubble!

The Cook Political Report did the same district-level analysis that I did yesterday, and found a considerably larger amount of variance.  Cook thinks that Clinton can get over the 63% bar in those heavily-Latino districts (I’m not so sure).  I understand that the 6-delegate seats require 58.3% of the vote to get a 4-2 split, which seems to me to be possible in Barbara Lee’s CA-09 and Nancy Pelosi’s CA-08, so Obama could be in an even stronger position than I thought.  And as Councilman Garcetti said last night, they are paying attention to this stuff, on both sides I would imagine.

Finally, we have somewhat neglected the Republican race.  The chic pick is that Romney has come all the way back and will take California.  John McCain is apparently worried about it, since it would mean that Romney has an argument to stay in the race.  Both candidates scurried back here today for extra bits of campaigning.

And yet McCain’s people fear he may lose the popular vote in California to Romney — even if they haul in the same number of CA delegates — and that the Super Tuesday story will therefore NOT be the crowning of McCain but rather his failure to put away the game, a failure born of his fractious and sometimes unloving relationship with conservatives, especially those millions of conservatives who listen to and abide by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, not to mention Limbaugh and Hannity themselves, and a failure that in turn will be viewed as both a symptom and a cause of the historic crack-up of the conservative coalition that has sustained and nourished the Republican Party for a couple generations.

Which would be fantastic, since it would be desirable for their race to be as screwed up as ours.  Could the relentless Rush Limbaugh attacks be having an impact?  We’ll soon find out.

UPDATE: Harold Meyerson has further thoughts, and they’re good.

With the budget resolution, the clock starts for the rest of the legislative session in Sacramento.  The Assembly and the Senate have until September 14th to pass bills before them and send them to the Governor’s desk for signature.  And obviously the centerpiece of the session is health care reform.  AB8 will be the organ for Democratic legislative leaders and the Governor to come to an understanding about how they want to fix the state’s health care crisis.  And the people are weighing in and saying that their preferred solution has a different bill number; SB 840.

UPDATE by Brian: Here’s the PDF of the relevant health care poll from Field.  Over…

Frank Russo reports:

36% of California voters support a new government run system–like Medicare–up from 24% in last December’s survey. At the same time support for making “reforms with the framework of the current health insurance system, with shared responsibilities by government and individuals” has dropped from 52% to 33%. Reliance on “free market competition to improve the health insurance system” draws only 14%, down from 18% previously.

So after months of all actors in the health care debate talking to their constituents, more people want to see health care for all than a shared responsibility framework that keeps the current for-profit system in place.  And the vast majority want to see something changed over the status quo.  Frank Russo teases this out, and exemplifies why I think the aggressive strategy by groups like the California Nurses Association has moved the goalposts:

Only eight short months ago in December 51% of California voters described themselves as satisfied with the current system. That number has dropped to 28% while those responding that they are dissatisfied has risen to 69% from 44% previously. The numbers who are very satisfied with what we have now has dropped to 7% from 13% previously and those who say they are “very dissatisfied” is now the largest response with 42%, up from 20% in that category before.

Table 4 in the poll shows the direct correlation of dissatisfaction with the health care system and those who want single payor. It also shows that the largest proposition of Democrats (47%) and “non-partisan/others” (39%) support single payor, while for Republicans the largest response is to reform the current system with insurance and “shared responsibility” (37%).

While it is not surprising that 55% of “liberals” support single payor, perhaps one of the more salient points of the Field Poll is that self described “middle-of-the-road” voters are split between these two options at 34% apiece and with only 10% saying they want to rely on a free market approach. While 31% of “conservatives” support the free market approach, 35% want to reform the current insurance system and 19% even support single payor.

This focus on not-for-profit health care has made reform of the current system completely reasonable, EVEN TO CONSERVATIVES.  Change is now demanded rather than sticking with the status quo.  Of course, Republicans are not needed to pass health care reform.  But they still have to vote on it, and so this can be a significant club to beat Republicans with in the next election, on the biggest domestic policy issue facing Americans.

As for how this will effect the actual legislation, it’s clear that this ups the pressure for SOME reform.  Democratic leaders should be emboldened by this, and should hold firm on the positive amendments that have already been added to the bill:

AB8, the Democratic plan, has been undergoing some work under the hood. Several amendments will hopefully be made to increase the affordability of health care, among those include a prescription dug purchasing pool that will have about 3-4 million participants. That will make it 2-3x larger than CalPERS. There is also talk of creating a public insurance program that everyone will be able to participate in. This is similar to a few of the Democratic presidential contenders plans to ensure there is an affordable option for health insurance for all residents. These amendments will be considered in hearings over the next few weeks.

It’s obvious that the public wants as progressive a proposal as possible.  The consequences of failure to reach a compromise are bad for everyone, but especially the governor.  He’s staked his entire year on this.  So let’s see a health care reform discussed out in the open so that everyone in the state knows where the main actors stand.

And the FIRST thing the Governor can do is to call the President and tell him to stop this campaign to deny children health care.  The onerous new S-CHIP rules must be abandoned.  If the Governor is serious about providing health care for all Californians, he must stand up to the President and live up to that responsibility.  DFA has started a campaign on this; you can call the Governor and tell him:

“President Bush’s new rules which reduce the availability of the Children’s Health Insurance Program for uninsured kids must be repealed. Governor Schwarzenegger must call President Bush today and demand a complete rollback of the new rules. Can I count on the governor to stand up for our kids?”

Many have remarked upon the new PPIC poll, which shows a trend downward for the Governor’s job approval.  Brian claimed that the budget impasse is to blame, and the fact that in the last couple days Schwarzenegger has urged in the media for Republicans to pass the plan suggests that’s his calculus as well.  But I’m not so sure.  Considering that the Governor’s environmental approval ratings are tracking his overall approval, I think it was the dustup over the California Air Resources Board that dragged him down in recent months.  Of the two stories, only the resignations of Robert Sawyer and Catherine Witherspoon got national attention, and it was a direct hit to the issue which Schwarzenegger is trying to use to define himself.

So let’s ask ourselves, a propos of Julia’s question about blogs and influence, how this seeped into the consciousness of the public, and what role we could play in continuing such, er, seepage.

The Air Resources Board is important and influential, but not exactly a household name.  I believe that it was Democratic lawmakers’ extreme focus on the situation, to the extent of holding hearings and threatening subpoenas, that got the press’ attention, or at least what little of it is left.  Schwarzenegger sought to quickly defuse the issue by hiring an environmental stalwart, Mary Nichols, to take over, and indeed her first major act, cracking down on diesel pollution, is a good sign.  However, that ruling does not address the implementation of the Global Warming Solutions Act, which of course is the major issue that Democrats in the Legislature were defending when they picked this fight which I believe had an impact on the Governor’s approval ratings.  We haven’t heard a lot about those subpoenas for Susan Kennedy or Dan Dunmoyer lately.  Obviously the budget battle is all-consuming right now, and the Assembly is in recess.

So there may come a time shortly to press that issue.  The Governor’s record on the environment is frankly spotty, and CARBgate actually points to his misuse of the office to push for implementation different from legislative intent.  Somehow, this got through the PR filter, and people understoof that Schwarzenegger was trying to slow-walk the global warming issue.  So how do we replicate this?  Obviously the ferocity of our electeds forced attention on the issue.  If and when the governor line-items the heck out of the budget, as appears likely, will they be just as loud?  Will that be another opportunity to fill in this image of the Governor as all talk about “post-partisanship” but in the end, a reliable supporter of corporate cronyism?  There clearly is potential here but state blogs aren’t big enough to drive it; the electeds have to get tough and call the governor out for attacking our environmental future, or programs for the poor.

(crossposted from Working Californians)

We want “Choices” to be your one-stop-shop for tracking the 2008 Presidential candidates on key quality-of-life and economic security issues. Why? Because our polling shows these will be key to determining voters’ choices for President, along with the dominant issue of Iraq. But thus far, likely voters report hearing strikingly little from the candidates on anything other than Iraq.

The site should be a two-way street — a place for voters to track the candidates, and a place for the candidates to speak directly to voters about core quality-of-life issues that so many voters rank as their greatest concerns. So we’re engaging the campaigns to encourage them to provide Californians with their plans for quality education, economic security & good jobs, the environment, energy & and sustainability, and health care.

To start, you can read about the strategic research, see the pollster’s two memos — the issues and the horse race.

You will see statistics from that poll sprinkled throughout the site.This week we are just rolling out the Democratic candidates, in conjunction with the CDP Convention this weekend.  Next week, the Republicans will be released.

It may have a bug or too and we are working on getting rid of that scroll bar right now, but poke around.  Click on a candidate’s name and you will get four choices of issues up top to go in more depth.  Some candidates are talking a great deal about Californian’s top issues, others barely at all.  Enjoy! Leave any bugs in the comments, or hit the contact page.

Mark Mellman conducted a fabulous poll and an even better memo, complete with graphs on likely Democratic primary voters in California.  Error margin is +/-4.9%.  Overview:

Our just completed statewide poll shows Hillary Clinton with a 19 point lead in the California Democratic primary. Despite Senator Clinton’s lead, however, the race is far from over. Her advantage is based importantly, but not completely, on two malleable factors: her higher name recognition and the belief that she would be the strongest general election candidate. She is the best known contender, but Obama and Edwards are more popular among Democratic primary voters who know them. Furthermore, a plurality (27%) of Democratic primary voters would support Barack Obama’s candidacy if their first choice candidate were no longer running in the primary. There is room for other candidates to break through to the California Democratic primary electorate between now and February 5, 2008; the race is very much still up-for-grabs.

The fat lady has not sung. There is much greater detail in the memo, but here is the graphical representation of the candidate’s favorability rankings.

Here are the straight up numbers:

Hillary Clinton 38%
Barack Obama 19%
John Edwards 17%
Richardson 4%
Joe Biden 4%
Mike Gravel 2%
Dennis Kucinich 1%
Chris Dodd 1%

Clinton’s lead is slightly greater (41%) among those paying very close attention to the primary, while Edwards and Obama tie for second place with 18% each. However, among those paying only somewhat close attention, Clinton’s support slips slightly to 36% while Obama’s support jumps to 25%, and Edwards receives 16%. Democratic primary voters who are not closely following the election are the least supportive of Obama, offering him just 13% of their vote, compared to 38% to Clinton and 17% to Edwards.

The race is far more competitive among voters who are familiar with all three top-tier candidates. Among these voters, Clinton’s total drops to 34%, while Obama’s support increases to 24% and Edwards’ support rises to 20%; just 10% of these most knowledgeable voters are undecided. This provides further evidence that part of Senator Clinton’s lead is based on her higher name recognition, an advantage that could disappear as primary day approaches.

Other interesting tidbits: Clinton has strong support from Californians who are highly concerned about jobs.  Obama gain support as voter’s second choice and demonstrates room to grow.  Go read the polling memo for all of the juicy details.  One more pretty chart.