Politics
Election 2012: Obama numbers not hurt by gay marriage embrace
U.S. President Barack Obama (l) and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney
President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign is beginning to express some confidence that the president’s historic, yet politically risky, embrace of gay marriage may not hurt him in the November election.
In a conference call announcing efforts to get gay and lesbian voters engaged in the Obama campaign, officials said poll numbers on same-sex marriage were increasingly tilting in their favor.
“A lot of recent polls show that support for gay marriage across the country is growing,” said Clo Ewing, an Obama campaign spokeswoman.
That includes a Washington Post-ABC News poll out Wednesday showing 53 percent of Americans say gay marriage should be a legal, a new high for the poll. Thirty-nine percent, a new low, say gay marriage should be illegal.
A separate poll showed that just 7 percent of registered voters said Obama’s public support for gay marriage raised concerns about supporting him. For 31 percent of voters, the president’s announcement reinforced their support of him and for 62 percent of voters, it did not make a difference, according to the NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll.
Immediately following Obama’s announcement of support for gay marriage, White House and campaign aides readily acknowledged that the political fallout was unclear. Obama himself said it was “very hard to say” whether the issue would hurt him in his fall campaign against presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
Despite the new national polling, Obama’s embrace of gay marriage comes with political risks. Thirty states have voted against gay marriage, including North Carolina, a key battleground state where voters approved a ban on same-sex unions the day before Obama announced his public support in a television interview.
