Back in April, Nate Silver created a great color-coded map of the states that showed his predictions for the the last years a marriage ban would pass in those states.
His prediction for Maine? 2009. It’s now or never, anti-LGBT Mainites! (Mainers?) But even their last chance isn’t looking so good. Today, super-statistician Nate wrote that, based on those stats behind his map, the same-sex marriage ban is likely to fail.
. . . we come up with an estimated level of support for the ban of 43.5 percent, with 56.5 percent opposed. In other words, the model’s prediction is that the ban will fail. The standard error of the forecast (not the margin of error, which is larger) is 5.2 points. This implies that the marriage ban only has about an 11 percent chance of passing.
. . . But don’t start counting your (gay) chickens yet, because there are a couple of additional circumstances that are relatively unique to Maine. . . that implies that a marriage ban will gain about another 4 points’ worth of support if it occurs in an off-year election. If that is the case, the projected support for the marriage ban is 47.5 percent, which means that it has a 32 percent chance of passing — about one in three.
. . . Another factor is that this is the first time that a state’s voters will be considering on a gay marriage bill that was actually affirmed by the state legislature. With the exception of Prop 8 — which was a response to court rather than legislative action — all of the other marriage initiatives have been preemptive in nature.
I swear, I could eat Nate up with a spoon.
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