Remember how last October the President said of marriage equality, "The one thing I will say today is I think it’s pretty clear where the trendlines are going."
Well, today, we get further confirmation from Nate Silver that the trendline is, in fact, moving in the right direction on marriage equality:
A poll from CNN this week is the latest to show a majority of Americans in favor of same-sex marriage, with 51 percent saying that marriages between gay and lesbian couples “should be recognized by the law as valid” and 47 percent opposed.As with much of what Nate writes, read the whole past. He provides some challenges for us and has a warning for anti-gay GOPers.
This is the fourth credible poll in the past eight months to show an outright majority of Americans in favor of gay marriage. That represents quite a lot of progress for supporters of same-sex marriage. Prior to last year, there had been just one survey — a Washington Post poll conducted in April 2009 — to show support for gay marriage as the plurality position, and none had shown it with a majority.
As we noted last August, support for gay marriage seems to have been increasing at an accelerated pace over the past couple of years. Below is an update to the graph from last year’s article, which charts the trend from all available public polls on same-sex marriage going back to 1988.
The trendline — derived through regression smoothing — estimates that about 50 percent of Americans now support gay marriage and that 46 percent are opposed, with a small percentage of voters undecided. By contrast, at this time two years ago, the numbers were 42 percent in favor and 53 percent opposed, according to the same technique.
We are heading in the right direction. That's why Maggie Gallagher, Brian Brown and their fellow homophobes are so frantic.
