Media Overstate Gay Marriage Support Among Young Americans

Young voters are abandoning social issues and focusing on fiscal ones, the  New York Times informs us in a hopeful voice. They present scant evidence for this contention, ignoring data from the General Social Survey showing that young voters—-who through the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s were the most pro-choice cohort—- became the most pro-life cohort around the year 2000 (even more pro-life than senior citizens). This difference in opinion is massively amplified by an ” intensity gap ” between pro-life and pro-choice young people. A 2012 NARAL survey found that 51 percent of pro-life voters age 30 or younger feel abortion is a very important issue in determining their vote while only 26 percent of their pro-choice peers feel the same way. Pro-life young people not only outnumber pro-choice young people in aboslute terms, they overwhelm two-to-one in terms of commitment to the issue, a result so depressing for pro-choice activists that it prompted Nancy Keenan, NARAL’s head, to resign.

The winds are blowing in a different direction on same-sex marriage, to be sure: 37 percent of young Republicans favor gay marriage, up from 28 percent eight years ago (yet still far below the 63 percent support among young people in general). The headline numbers do not tell the full story. Same-sex marriage famously receives less support—-about seven points less—-at the ballot box than on opinion polls because voters who oppose same-sex marriage are reluctant to admit their opposition to an interviewer. But is support for same-sex marriage uniformly overstated? If respondents lie because they feel social pressure to support same-sex marriage, those who feel the most social pressure (i.e., young people) are likely to be the cohort in which support is most radically overstated. Same-sex marriage proponents have learned to mistrust opinion polls, but have failed to absorb the lesson that polls of young people are likely to be the least reliable of all.

Gay marriage has its own intensity gap, a fact that underlines how polls systematically overstate same-sex marriage support. An ABC/Langer Research Associates poll found that 65 percent of conservatives reacted in a strongly unfavorable way to Obama’s same-sex marriage announcement while only 52 percent of Democrats responded in a strongly favorable way. Some of those Democrats just don’t feel strongly  about the issue; others are the people who really disagree with Obama but won’t admit as much to pollsters. The 13-point difference reflects a basic imbalance in the debate: opposition to same-sex marriage is much firmer than support for it, and proponents are going to have an increasingly difficult time converting those who have held out this long. The hope that a national debate on same-sex marriage will inevitably advance its cause is also cast into doubt by the fact that during campaigns on same-sex marriage questions, we haven’t seen a net shift in opinion one way or the other . In short, we should not be surprised to see the increase in youth support stop when the issue leaves the headlines (or when young people move off campuses and into the suburbs where there is less social pressure in favor of the elite consensus).

None of this is reflected in the  Times  story, which takes favorable polls at face value, ignores unfavorable ones, and interviews non-representative subjects (College Republicans tend to be the résumé-building establishment types who have been losing elections and influence in the party for the last decade). Yet the story still teaches us something, namely, that even if young Republicans care less about social issues (which does not seem to be the case) the  Times cares about them more than ever. The tell here, which is a sort of death knell for liberalism, is how hopefully the Times  notes that fiscal issues are displacing social ones. Since when did liberals prefer a Republican party devoted to rolling back healthcare reform and slashing the welfare state to one that argues against killing unborn children and rewriting the definition of marriage? Aren’t these the issues that Kansans are supposed to ignore in favor of “real” economic ones?

One could write a book titled  What’s the Matter with the Upper West Side ? if this new form of liberalism wasn’t precisely the one most friendly to the class interests of the  Times’ readers and editors. This combination of pro-business economics with sexual liberationism—-let’s call it Bloombergism—-is the new consensus around which the Democratic Party is built. It allows wealthy voters to vote for their own interests on economic matters while still congratulating themselves on their liberal social opinions. It is an ideology that strikes not one but two blows to the working man, ignoring his economic interests while shredding the social fabric on which he particularly relies.