Who Is to Blame for Same-Sex Marriage Delay? Young Voters

In announcing its decision to wait until 2012 to qualify an initiative legalizing same-sex marriage, Equality California released this extensive plan for victory.

It's worth a read, even if you don't care about marriage equality. Why? Because the document is blunt -- and detailed -- in explaining the difficulties of drawing young voters to the polls.

The same-sex marriage issue is largely about age. If the electorate is young enough, same-sex marriage advocates will win. The main reason why they want to wait until 2012 is because the electorate is likely to be younger in 2012, a presidential election year. Why's that? Because young voters don't show up for state elections--and no one has figured out a way to do much of anything about that.

From the Equality California plan: 

The argument [for going ahead with an initiative in 2010] goes like this: in a gubernatorial election, if we
identify and turn out many of those young people that voted for president who do not
ordinarily vote for governor, we can make up the gap. Upon further analysis, that does
not appear to be a strategy that will give us a winning margin. For one, this has been tried
unsuccessfully by many campaigns seeking to turn out young voters that have learned that
voting behavior is diffi cult to change. Second, while we have strong support among younger
voters, polling shows the intensity of their support is generally lower than the intensity of
our opponents' opposition, so motivating these younger voters to turn out will be at least
as diffi cult as our opponents' efforts to motivate their supporters to turn out. Third, we must
assume that our opponents will carry out the same kind of voter identifi cation/get-out-the-
vote program, and they have at least as ready access to their base in conservative churches as we will on college campuses and high schools. To be clear, this is not an argument
against an intensive registration/voter identifi cation/get-out-the-vote effort. We must do
this work as we prepare to return to the ballot. We do not want to negate the ability of the
grassroots to enlist new people to register and encourage young people to vote-we think it
is powerful.  But we do not believe it is a strategy that will, on its own, close the margin, nor
do we believe it's a strong argument on its own for returning to the ballot in 2010.