A growing majority of Americans support legalizing marijuana
In the wake of this week's off-year elections, Molly Ball penned
a painfully off-base piece in the
Atlantic arguing that Democrats fared poorly on Tuesday because, as the headline put it, "liberals are losing the culture wars." There are many things wrong with Ball's argument: For one, progressives actually
had a pretty good election night, thanks to a huge sweep of Pennsylvania's Supreme Court that will give Democrats control over the next round for legislative redistricting.
For another, Ball tries to brush away the very serious problem any analyst faces when comparing presidential elections with midterm years—or even worse, freakazoid elections in odd-numbered years like this one. "To be sure," Ball hand-waves 676 words into her column, "Tuesday was an off-off-year election with dismally low voter turnout, waged in just a handful of locales." To be sure, indeed!
But here's the heart of the matter: On most of the "culture war" issues that Ball cites as a source of Democratic woe, the majority of Americans support the mainstream Democratic position! Let's look at Ball's catalog one by one:
In Tuesday's elections, voters rejected recreational marijuana, transgender rights, and illegal-immigrant sanctuaries; they reacted equivocally to gun-control arguments; and they handed a surprise victory to a Republican gubernatorial candidate who emphasized his opposition to gay marriage.
Below we'll take a look at actual public opinion on each of these issues.
• Marijuana (Gallup):
A majority of Americans continue to say marijuana use should be legal in the United States, with 58% holding that view, tying the high point in Gallup's 46-year trend.
•
Transgender rights (Public Religion Research Institute):
Three-quarters (75%) of Americans agree that Congress should pass laws to protect transgender people from job discrimination. This support persists across the political and religious spectrum.
Approximately three-quarters (74%) of Americans also favor Congress' recent expansion of federal hate crime laws to include crimes committed on the basis of the victim's gender, sexual orientation or gender identity, compared to only 22% who oppose.
•
Guns (
New York Times/CBS):
In general, do you think laws covering the sale of guns should be made more strict, less strict, or kept as they are now?
More strict: 58
Less strict: 8
Kept as they are: 31
Do you favor or oppose a federal law requiring background checks on all potential gun buyers?
Favor: 92
Oppose: 7
•
Same-sex marriage (Pew Research Center):
In Pew Research polling in 2001, Americans opposed same-sex marriage by a 57% to 35% margin.
Since then, support for same-sex marriage has steadily grown. Based on polling in 2015, a majority of Americans (55%) support same-sex marriage, compared with 39% who oppose it.
I'll give Ball one issue: The concept of "sanctuary cities"
doesn't seem to poll well. But you'd be hard-pressed to find many—or even any—elections that have turned on that topic. However, the broader issue of immigration reform that offers a pathway to citizenship is, like everything else on Ball's list,
quite popular.
How, then, can it be that Democrats are "losing the culture wars" when majorities (and often growing majorities) are with them on all the major issues of the day? Ball claims that a number of elections on Tuesday turned on these cultural issues. She's wrong—they did not, each for its own set of reasons—but even if we accept her assertion, then why did Democratic candidates lose or liberal ballot measures fail when, in poll after poll, Americans say they favor the progressive point of view?
You could argue that the polls themselves are wrong, but there's no evidence you could cite to support such an argument. And we're also talking about a lot of polls. None of the results listed above are cherry-picked: If you Google, you'll find plenty of other surveys backing them up. Are all of them just borked?
Alternately, you could argue that respondents feel social pressure to answer polls the way they think they're "supposed" to, but that's just another way of saying that people are lying. What's more, if you want to claim an issue like gay marriage is actually unpopular, you'd have to further argue that more and more people are lying each year.
But we have good evidence that they aren't. In 2012, opponents of same-sex marriage in Minnesota put a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would have defined marriage as between one man and one woman. PPP's final poll found 52 percent opposed and 45 percent in favor. The amendment was defeated by almost exactly that margin, 53-47.
Or you could settle on the truth—the truth that Ball tried to wave away as mostly meaningless: The composition of the electorate matters. When the broadest swath of Americans comes out to vote, which unfortunately is only once every four years, Democrats tend to do well. During midterm or off-year elections, a greater proportion of Republican-leaning voters show up at the polls, with predictable results.
This is a huge, even devastating problem for Democrats. Until the party can fix it, it can look forward to plenty more ass-kickings whenever a presidential race isn't on the ballot. But this is a turnout problem, not a "culture wars" problem. That's okay, though: If Republicans decide to heed Ball's faulty conclusions because it conforms to their prejudices, then they'll try to fight next year's battle for the White House over gay marriage, weed, and immigration. Democrats should only hope to be so lucky.
