A new poll released Wednesday found
foes of a gay marriage law in Washington state gaining ground.
Referendum 74 asks voters to either
uphold or reject a marriage law approved by lawmakers. Previous
polls showed the measure winning with a comfortable margin.
But the new statewide Elway Poll
brought bad news for supporters, finding Referendum 74's lead had
dwindled down to just 4 percentage points – 49-45 percent.
“We have gained 10 points since last
month's poll and are within 4 points and closing in: The other side
is under 50 percent for the first time,” Rev. Joe Fuiten, senior
pastor at Cedar Park Assembly of God Church, wrote on his Facebook
page.
Maggie Gallagher of the National
Organization for Marriage (NOM), the nation's most vociferous
opponent of marriage equality, said she wasn't surprised by the
results.
“I've seen this kind of swing against
gay marriage before, and I would say I'm not surprised: Except that
this time the push for gay marriage is so monumentally huge, the
money odds so monstrously lopsided, and the fight so deep in such a
secular blue state, I had my doubts. Silly me,” she wrote in a
National
Review op-ed.
“Look for a lot of shocked pundits on
election night in November. Again,” she added before asking for
donations to the campaigns.
In 2009, Washington voters upheld a
domestic partnership law dubbed by the media “everything but
marriage.”
Anne Levinson, a former judge and a key
Referendum 74 supporter, told the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer that Elway had underestimated the 2009
vote.
“At the time he released a poll
showing us losing: We won with 53.15 percent making Washington state
the first and only state in the nation voting in favor of LGBT
families,” she said in an e-mail.