Did We Jump the Gun?

Many have pointed to this Paul Freedman article at Slate, which makes the case that anti-gay initiatives may not have had the electoral impact many of us assumed. He’s got some good points, although I’m not entirely convinced we should write off the possibility of this impact, especially in Ohio. In fact, as we look into this, and the margin of victory shrinks in Ohio, it seems entirely possible we might reach the conclusion that a) the turnout effect of anti-gay ballot initiatives had only a minor impact on the nationwide popular vote, and b) they still swung the election to Bush by putting him over the top in Ohio. As we’ve all tried in vain to explain to Naderites about 2000, yes, relatively trivial factors can be decisive in close elections.

I was also unaware that 49% of the electorate said they trusted Bush but not Kerry on the terrorism issue (compared to 31% the other direction). This figure is highly troubling, and it’s difficult for me to see exactly what Kerry should have done differently to prevent this, except perhaps respond more quickly and vigorously to various slanders on this subject.

Update: Let me explain a bit more why I suspect Freedman’s analysis might be a touch misleading. Ohio is one of the initiative states, and one of only a handful of states in which Kerry improved on Gore’s performance. One might conclude from that the initiative didn’t do much for the Republicans. That would be premature. Ohio was all but written off by the Democrats in 2000, and they put up their strongest fight of just about any state, visiting Ohio dozens of times and pouring money into it. Furthermore, Ohio is a state in which (unlike Florida) the lack of job creation of the last four years has hit particularly hard. So with those factors going our way, the fact that Kerry only improved on mildly on Gore’s performance suggests that there may well have been countervailing tendencies at work.