Whenever you hear a Republican say their party should ignore social issues, they are basically arguing against minority outreach. It is a call for jettisoning areas of agreement between conservatives and subsets of black and Latino voters in order to keep white voters from being divided over values.
But there’s another equally problematic argument that social conservatism can be the entirety of the GOP’s minority outreach — as if it’s sufficient to argue that support for faith and family makes blacks and Latinos “natural Republicans.”
The Pew Research Center’s latest polling on gay marriage illustrates the limits of this strategy. After the 2004 presidential election, many observers argued that George W. Bush was re-elected in part because so many voters turned out to reject same-sex marriage.
Not only did marriage-related ballot initiatives drive up turnout among white evangelical Christians and other socially conservative “values voters,” the argument went. It was claimed that opposition to gay marriage helped Bush win upwards of 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. Bush’s marriage position was also credited with a slight uptick in black support in Ohio, a critical battleground state.
The significance of gay marriage to the 2004 elections has since been reappraised and debated. What seems inarguable is that it won’t move many minority voters into the Republican column in 2016.
Blacks are still more likely than whites to oppose same-sex marriage, according to Pew. While 59 percent of whites say they support gay marriage, only 41 percent of blacks agree. While only 39 percent of Americans told Pew they opposed same-sex marriage in May 2015, this rose to 51 percent among blacks.
Black Protestants oppose same-sex marriage (57 percent) more than almost any other large group other than white evangelicals (70 percent). This shouldn’t be surprising: while there are big political gaps between black and white evangelical churches, they are closer on theology.
While blacks are more likely than whites to oppose gay marriage, Pew found they are less likely to find the issue important. A 43 percent plurality of blacks said same-sex marriage is “not important at all,” while only 21 percent of whites agreed. Thirty-two percent of whites think it is “very important” and 26 percent “somewhat important.” Combined, that’s 20 points ahead of the share of blacks who feel the same.
The lack of salience of gay marriage for black voters isn’t terribly surprising. While blacks have generally voted against recognizing same-sex marriage when the issue has been put on the ballot, they have also been willing to vote overwhelmingly for socially liberal candidates who support gay marriage.
Barack Obama didn’t support gay marriage yet when he ran for president in 2008, at least not publicly. But he did oppose California’s Proposition 8, which defined marriage in the Golden State as the union of a man and a woman. According to exit polls, 70 percent of black Californians voted for Prop 8. They were indispensable to the initiative’s passage, though it has since been tossed aside by the Supreme Court. At the same time, 94 percent of black voters who turned out in California that year cast their ballots for Obama.
Obama’s public embrace of gay marriage in 2012 helped move black public opinion somewhat. This proved important in Maryland, where marriage was on the ballot that November and the percentage of African-Americans is the highest of any state outside the Deep South. Even so, about 95 percent of Maryland blacks who cast ballots that year voted for Obama while just 46 percent backed gay marriage.
Like a lot of socially conservative white ethnics before them, there is a tension in the black community. They tend to be churchgoing Christians, which leads to some conservative moral convictions. And they are also Democrats.
Hispanics, incidentally, now support gay marriage by 56 percent to 38 percent. That’s just three points behind non-Hispanic white support for same-sex marriage and 1 point behind white opposition.
Gay marriage looks like it’s a social issue on the way out. Even most same-sex marriage opponents polled by Pew think the redefinition of marriage is inevitable.
The Republican Party is shifting from entertaining constitutional amendments that would have blocked state recognition of gay nuptials to leaving the issue entirely to the states, the same position taken by Obama and Hillary Clinton three short years ago.
But the basic conclusion isn’t much different for other more enduring cultural battles, such as the debates over abortion and religion in the public square. Blacks and Hispanics are, like most people, more socially conservative than secular white liberals. That’s not enough to get them to vote Republican.
