In light of the New York State Senate’s decision on Wednesday to vote down gay marriage, I’ve been thinking a little bit more about what happened last month in Maine, where voters passed Question 1 — reversing the state legislature’s decision to allow for gay marriage — by roughly a 5-point margin.
We had previously developed a statistical model, based on the result of ballot initiatives in other states, which predicted that gay marriage would most likely be upheld in Maine. The model was somewhat well hedged, giving itself as much as a 1 in 3 chance of being wrong depending on what assumptions were made. Nevertheless, this was certainly a disappointing result — from both a policy and a forecasting perspective — especially considering that the vote wasn’t actually all that close. It’s one that’s worth a little self-reflection.
There are essentially three conclusions that we might come to in evaluating the model’s performance:
1) It was a basically good model that got a little “unlucky”;
2) It was a poorly specified model that missed important factors in play in Maine;
3) It was a decent enough model, but missed some sort of national backlash against gay marriage.
Full Story from fivethirtyeight.com: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/maine-revisited-is-there-backlash.html
Click here for gay marriage resources.
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