That of course begs the question of the “paradox” you mention. The Monkey Cage blog wrote about this last month and I think hit it spot on: We can’t compare past failures to now. Public *has* shifted, both nationally and on a state level. Now, we need to be careful about what that means. That does *not* mean that majorities in every state support marriage equality. They don’t. Look at NC… State level polling well before the ballot measure painted a very grim picture (even with a shift in the past couple years marriage equality does not have majority support in the state). The same can be said about all the Constitutional Amendments passed in ’04; they passed in states with low approval for marriage equality. They were going to pass regardless of what the campaign did or didn’t do because a majority of the people there *already* didnt approve of marriage equality. No ad, no yard sign, no paper or book can change that sort of dynamic.

With that said, I think it’s important to understand that since these battles take place on a *state* level, then we need to look at each particular case on its own to some extent. Maine and California are not the same kind of states. Neither is North Carolina. We need to pay attention to state level polling and trends and situate them properly.

Thanks. I’m actually not all that great with technology. However, if anyone out there wants to incorporate my ideas into a YouTube video or a commercial, go right ahead. I assert no ownership rights in them.

As for your second point, Harvey Milk was so right when he said that, if people know us, they are less likely to vote against us.

@Timothy:

As late as mid-September of 2008, polls had Proposition 8 trailing by substantial margins. The respected Field Poll had it trailing by 17 percentage points.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8#Pre-decision_opinion_polls

But it’s my understanding (I’m not a Californian) that, in late September of 2008, the Yes-on-8 campaign began running its TV commercials. It started with the “Whether You Like It or Not” ad (featuring Gavin Newsom’s cringe-worthy sound bite). Then, starting in early October, it began running its “King and King” ad — the one with the young girl telling her horrified mother that in school she had read “King and King” and was told that someday she could marry a princess.

Our side’s numbers then crashed.

After the No-on-8 campaign began running its response ads, the numbers stabilized, and there were polls that even had our side leading just before the election. But, as you said, the Election Day results were as if the undecideds voted “yes.” To this day, I think that there was a Bradley effect.

As for Minnesota, my reading of the proposed amendment is that it only addresses “marriage,” by that name. The proposed amendment reads: “Only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Minnesota.”
http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Minnesota_Same-Sex_Marriage_Amendment_(2012)

It has been common to interpret provisions like this as only prohibiting gay “marriage,” by that name specifically. Personally, I have never understood how such an amendment can be avoided by giving gay couples “civil unions,” with all of the rights and obligations of “marriage” minus only the name. But that has been the interpretation.

Finally, I wonder whether Dick Cheney would agree to participate in such an ad. I read that he personally lobbied a Republican legislator in Maryland to vote in favor of marriage equality.

I want a marriage ad featuring Dick Cheney and Laura Bush.

Or here’s a ballsy idea. In Minnesota it bans civil unions as well. Has anyone called Rush Limbaugh and asked him to stand behind his words?

I GUARANTEE that if there were an ad playing on radio in which Limbaugh opposed the amendment because it goes too far, it would lose.

I don’t think the polls showed Prop 8 going down in flames.

What it showed was 48% voting no and a smaller percent voting yes. We assumed that we would split the “I don’t know”s.

All th I don’t knows voted yes and 48% voted no just as polled.

If you look back on the votes, that’s pretty consistent. We get the percent who told pollsters they were for us and all of the I don’t knows went to the other side. Anti-gay is the default position.

It’s not exact science every time, but it proved to be true often enough that I tend to use it in my assumptions

SA, you seem to have good ideas that really take aim at the heart of the anti-gay’s fears (no matter how imagined they are). The promiscuity issue has particularly struck me, as it has many of you, as being circular logic. Yet, my reasoning it out with somebody isn’t going to help. They need it disputed quickly, simply and graphically.

While you make a good point about ‘the next generation’, I would dispute that to some degree. Never before have gay people, even same-sex couples, been as welcomed into the lives around them. My partner and I have had the privilege of sharing meals with many young couples, most of whom have young children. In front of these families, we have been able to show displays of affection like those any straight couple might engage in without thought. If we, as friends of these people, can do so, why should they then be threatened by the strangers on whose rights they are being asked to vote? Our strongest campaign is our love and commitment to our partners, or our expressions of yearning for such a relationship.

A suggestion that I would make is include in your proposed ad an introduction along the lines of what I said earlier: “The opponents of marriage equality say that gay people can get married; they just have to marry someone of the opposite sex. But that’s exactly the problem.”

The reason: Without that introduction, the other side (and the viewers) could simply shift the blame to the gay people shown in the ad and say, “Of course, they shouldn’t marry my son or my daughter.”

Adding the “hook” that I propose would show that we are simply tracking the other side’s own argument, and would shift the blame back to them.

Here’s another idea for a commercial, intended to activate the “reptile” brain:

The theme of the ad would be “It’s us today. It could be you tomorrow.” If this era’s disfavored minority’s rights can be subject to a public vote, who’s next? The idea comes from the famous free-verse poem “First they came,” attributed to German pastor Martin Niemöller: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came

The line comes from Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie’s speech to the League of Nations as the League (and the United States as well) made an ineffectual response to Mussolini’s invasion and conquest of his country (“It is us today. It will be you tomorrow.”).

The ad would show a series of gay people, saying comments along the lines of:

“Gay people are the ones whose rights are being voted on today. Who’s next?

“It’s us today. It could be you tomorrow.

“What kind of precedent does this set for the people of [insert state name]?

“It’s us today. It could be you tomorrow.

“People are watching. If someone’s rights can be the subject of a popular vote, then whose rights are safe?

“It’s us today. It could be you tomorrow.

“Whose rights are next?

“It’s us today. It could be you tomorrow.

“Vote for marriage equality. Vote [in the requested manner, i.e., for or against the referendum question].”

The demographics of the country are changing, and this ad could get people thinking about what could happen — to THEM — if civil rights can be made subject to the vagaries of popular opinion.

Our side, for the time being, has to do a similar thing. We all know that there are people out there who simply will never be “persuaded” to vote for marriage equality. Nathaniel’s experience illustrates that. Here is another example of someone in North Carolina who simply is not going to be persuaded:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX0aJmmPcn8

Our side can obviously (and easily) point out the flaws in what he is “arguing,” but that would be for the benefit of other people, the ones who can be persuaded.

Could we have won in North Carolina? I don’t know. I always doubted it, but maybe that was my own reptilian brain at work. I didn’t want to get hurt again, so my brain set itself up at the starting point of assuming that we would lose.

To respond to Donny D.’s question, I don’t know specifically how the political consultants are selected. The established LGBT groups on the marriage issue in each state (usually with the word “Equality” in their names) supposedly take the lead on this.

I recognize that our side has a significant learning curve, because we actually have little experience with truly contested elections on the marriage issue. In the vast majority of the plebiscites in the past 10 years or so, our side was expected to lose handily, and that prevented the raising of the money that is the lifeblood of a successful political campaign, or even the creation of a serious campaign in the first place.

That said, while I respected and admired the energy, the enthusiasm, and the good intentions of the No-on-1 campaign in North Carolina, my concern is that they were led down the wrong path by their political consultants or by their own well-intentioned but flawed strategy.

I saw what they were trying to do. They were trying to re-capture the lightning in a bottle that our side caught in Arizona in 2006. The problem, beyond the difficulties faced in a Southeastern state, was that the method was flawed.

First, I didn’t think that the “Amendment One could affect our domestic violence laws” argument was all that persausive, either from a legal perspective or in the commercials that ran. The commercials didn’t really explain why the amendment would affect the domestic violence laws. I would have liked to have seen a commercial that actually QUOTED the amendment — including the phrase “domestic legal union” — with the word “domestic” then morphing into a line about the amendment’s hurting the “domestic” violence laws.

The other commercial that the No-on-1 campaign ran was, I’m sorry to say, well-intentioned but not effective. It featured a young woman, obviously stressed, who was concerned that the amendment would cause her daughter to lose her health insurance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlKsycrW1rw

The amendment did not say the type of relationship in which the woman was, other than to say “we’re unmarried” (with respect to her never-seen significant other). Here, again, they were hiding the homosexuality factor and making it look shameful, thus counteracting their own purposes. Also, the commercial did not explain HOW the amendment would affect her daughter’s health insurance. Therefore, to John and Jane Citizen of North Carolina, it was pretty much useless.

As I said before, if polling showed that North Carolinians were more likely to vote against Amendment One if they knew that it banned civil unions and domestic partnership laws, then why not have a commercial saying that Amendment One would ban civil unions and domestic partnership laws?

Don’t worry about losing the conservative types; you’re not going to get many of their votes anyway. The other side in North Carolina never made any bones about the basis for its campaign. Their commercials featured a book with the “Holy Bible” imprint and spoke what God intended.

This November, our side will have four more opportunities, and these ones do indeed have the potential for success. As Mark F. said, changing societal attitudes toward LGBT people will help us, with polls showing that young people support marriage equality in significantly larger proportions than their elders.

But we can’t just rely on that. The other side could still “reptile” us again. A lot of those young people either have, or will eventually have, children. Their reptilian brains could look at their kids playing and cause them to think, “I just can’t do it. Children are very impressionable. How will gay marriage affect them? I don’t know, so I can’t take that chance.”

That’s the problem that we will continue to face. LGBT people have been waiting for 40 years for “the next generation” to ride to our rescue. There are indeed been substantial changes. (I think that it’s great that we’re even talking about this issue now. It was unthinkable 25 years ago.) There will continue to be substantial changes because, as Charles said, people will see the lack of negative consequences in the jurisdictions that have marriage equality.

But we can’t just rely on waiting for the older generation to die off. Recently here at Box Turtle Bulletin, a writer quoted a poster at another forum who said that he had been an LGBT rights activist since the 1960′s. The poster said, “If you’re waiting for the homophobes to die, you’re waiting for me to die.”

Our side has to take the right actions in the right way to get the right results. Otherwise, we could still face the catcalls from the other side that we win polls and lose elections.

This November could have mixed results, it could be a clean sweep in our favor, or it could be a clean sweep against us.

Meadowlark’s idea of featuring happy and ordinary scenes involving gay people is a good one, but it has to be as a part of an overall strategy of conveying to the public how marriage equality helps THEM.

*Limiting promiscuity among gay men, which is a public health issue in which the public has an interest;
*Helping the children who are being raised by gay parents;
*Stopping sham marriages and all of the costs that they impose on the community and on the parties themselves (which could be your own son or your own daughter);
*Improving the health and happiness of gay people and their families, thus impoving the overall productivity and health of the community and reducing the costs imposed on society by the lack of health and productivity.

The “I don’t need your marriage license” attitude of much of the public is the quicksand on which our campaigns are now sitting, unfortunately. We are marketing a product, and, as in all marketing, we have to convince the consumers to buy it.

And, finally, as Donny D. said, our side cannot make the mistake again of ignoring minority communities. The other side isn’t.