logo

After 8: What Went Wrong

By Nick Sifuentes - Nov 7th, 2008 at 11:05 am

Part one of a three-part post.

The best hopes and dreams of proponents of marriage equality were dashed in the small hours of the morning on Wednesday. The exuberance of Barack Obama’s victory had been overlaid for many with dreadful anticipation, and as the California returns begun to trickle in, so too did dismay.

Now the final results seem to indicate that Proposition 8 passed by the most heartbreakingly slim of margins: 52 percent to 48 percent. We must begin to ask the question: what went wrong? How could we come so close and yet, in the end, lose? And we should ask it not to point fingers and assign blame, but rather so that when the next battle comes in California–and it will come–we know where we went wrong.

For starters, the No on 8 campaign was poorly run. Both my partner and myself did volunteer work for the campaign (he more than me; I was directing a concurrent campaign for the DNC), and it was clear that their ground game did not take shape until a mere few weeks before Election Day, even in heavily supportive areas like West Hollywood. Contrast this with the Obama campaign, which began its ground game for the general election months ago. While it might seem at first ridiculous to compare a battle over a single ballot initiative in a single state with the national affair that is the presidential election, remember: the fight over Prop 8 cost over $74 million, more than has ever been spent on a social issue proposition in history.

Aside from failures at the ground level, the No on 8 campaign mishandled its air war. Its early TV advertisements were lame, tepid stabs forward at something that should have been handled more viscerally. A defensive campaign such as No on 8 (it was constantly fighting against the proposition, so it was necessarily fighting a defensive action) should have been willing to counterattack. However, time and again its ads were soft-focus clips of older couples talking about their gay children, always offscreen, hidden from voters as if in shame or embarrassment. Such an ad campaign would have been appropriate in North Dakota, which has the second-lowest percentage of same-sex couples as a proportion of its electorate. California, by contrast, has the fifth-highest percentage of same-sex couples of any state; they also tend to be reliable voters.

On the subject of campaign ads, No should have used its endorsements earlier and more frequently. It had a long, bipartisan list of endorsements, from major church groups to Democratic and Republican politicians, including both of California’s U.S. Senators, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Republican San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, and now-President-elect Barack Obama. While Sen. Diane Feinstein recorded an excellent ad in the closing weeks for No on 8, she should have been one in a string of recorded endorsements—or, barring recorded statements from reluctant candidates, a commercial that employed a recitation of those endorsements would have sufficed, had it not been aired a mere three days before the election commenced and well after absentee voting had begun.

Lastly, and perhaps most controversially, I believe No on 8 should also have been willing to play as divisively as its opponents; reports showed that over 70 percent of the funds donated to Yes on 8 came from either the Mormon church in Utah or Mormons directed to donate by their pastors; much of those funds came from out of state and some even from outside of the country. The No on 8 campaign should have addressed the funding meta-issue head-on by running ads that essentially asked voters: do you want California’s future decided by a cabal of wealthy contributors from out of state? In so doing, they could also have played on the Mormon church’s long history of discriminatory practice, framing their current attacks as another in a line of bigotry. If this had been the closing assault, the Yes campaign would have had little time for any response.

In the end, No on 8’s organizers ran their campaign in the same way that trepidatious Democrats ran the DLC in the 1990s: watering down the essential message out of fear that that message would prove divisive or controversial. It was so watered-down that the campaign even avoided the use of the word “gay,” as attested to by a campaign worker:

As soon as I started working for the No on 8 campaign I was amazed at the level of scripting: “don’t say ‘civil rights,’ don’t say ‘constitution,’ don’t say ‘gay.’” I couldn’t believe it.

Having worked for the campaign, I can say that this was true: the messaging focused on staying close to talking points rather than explaining to voters the visceral import of marriage rights to those of us who volunteered. Interestingly, Andrew Sullivan feels the same way:

It’s the Clinton-Democratic-Establishment approach. It never works. But they will never change.

The blame for Proposition 8’s passage does not solely rest on the poor showing of the No on 8 campaign, however. The Yes campaign was happy to run a disinformation campaign, telling Californians that gay marriage would be taught in schools and that churches could be sued or lose their tax-exempt status for refusing to marry gay couples–both untrue under California law. Rumors existed that the Yes on 8 organizers were telling opponents that a “Yes” vote meant “Yes” to gay marriage, thereby confusing potential No on 8 supporters.

In fact, the bulk of the organizing in which I took part revolved around educating voters–on Election Day–that those who sought to keep same-sex marriage legal needed to vote “No.” That a campaign to educate voters on which way to vote had to be conducted on November 4 says something for the disorganization–or ineffectiveness–of the No campaign. Yes on 8 had to rely on disinformation in order to convince Californians to vote for discrimination; they recognized that they could not win on the merits of their claims, so they had to find spurious, untruthful rationales for their bigotry. The unfortunate result was that Californians narrowly believed Yes on 8’s arguments and, in so doing, wrote discrimination into the California constitution.

Why we lost is abundantly clear: Yes on 8 ran a strong, well-funded effort designed to mislead voters into undoing a fundamental right, and No did not fight effectively against the Yes campaign’s untruths. We will win only if we learn from the failures of No on 8 in building a new campaign to overturn Proposition 8 in 2010 or 2012.

Tags: California, civil rights, gay marriage, human rights, LGBT, Proposition 8