Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Connecting the Dots Between Maine and NY-23    [Thomas Peters]

I’ve been focusing my attention on the critical Maine marriage vote today, but it’s not the only state where the issue of marriage is before voters.

The National Organization for Marriage, which is heavily involved in Maine, has also contributed to making marriage an issue in NY-23. From Ben Smith:

As conservative groups scramble to take credit for their roles in Doug Hoffman's surge, the National Organization for Marriage sends on a poll indicating that Dede Scozzfava's stance on marriage put her well out of line with the district, not to mention the Republican Party.

I disagree with Smith here — it’s not conservative groups that are scrambling, it’s reporters who are scrambling to figure out how to account for the Hoffman surge (NOM President Maggie Gallagher mentioned her interest in NY-23 on the Corner weeks ago, and gay bloggers have since been slamming NOM as being “among the earliest detractors of Scozzafava and one of the earliest supporters of Hoffman” — so take it from them).

NOM has since spent over $100,000 on “mailers and calls” in the district, and they claim it has had a positive effect for Hoffman:

NOM’s voter outreach clearly had an impact: 60% of voters recall having seen advertisements on the issue of same-sex marriage, and Hoffman leads 50%-34% among those who recall seeing such ads, while Hoffman is tied with Owens, 42% - 41%, among those who do not recall having seen such ads.

Here is a sample of NOM’s materials, which were distributed to about 70,000 households in the district.

In contrast, the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group for gay marriage which recently hosted President Obama, contacted their 850 members in NY-23 on behalf of Owens (no that’s not a typo — less than a thousand contacts).

Now there’s a change: a well-funded traditional-marriage group creates awareness of a social issue while the gay-marriage lobby is missing in action. I wonder how this one slipped through?

— Thomas Peters is the communications director for the American Principles Project, where he also blogs.

11/03 06:13 PMShare