Clinton appears to be on her way to winning California by a huge margin (but not with a large enough percentage to win bonus delegates). What’s with Edwards getting 10 percent of the votes?
[Morning update: okay, not so huge. And Edwards is getting more like 4 percent.]
And Andrew Sullivan points out that California’s gay population is going for Clinton over Obama by nearly 2 to 1. WTF?
1) Absentee ballots are huge in CA. People have been voting for Edwards for weeks.
2) It may come as a surprise to those of us who get all of our news from blogs, but Clinton is still popular with just about every Democratic core constituency. Why shouldn’t she win the gays? She’s been better on gay issues than Obama.
I forgot about the mail-in votes. True.
Clinton and Obama seem pretty similar to me on gay rights though.
Back when SF mayor Gavin Newsom was busy marrying gay men and lesbians at City Hall, he later did a couple of fundraisers for Obama. Obama let it be known that he didn’t want his picture taken with Newsom. That’s a pretty crappy thing to do to a (straight) elected official taking an enormous risk for the gay community.
I ended up voting for Obama yesterday, and I didn’t read this article until after I voted. If I had read it, I might have changed my vote.
I dunno if your comments allow links, but it was in yesterday’s SF Chronicle at SFGate.com
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2008/02/05/BAM5US1B5.DTL
I dunno if you’re in the 8th CG, but I know that Scott Stringer and Tom Duane were both listed as Clinton’s delegates… That gave me some confidence after the lion’s share of Edwards’ LGBT committee went to Obama.
Bill: I just read the article and while it is disappointing, I don’t think it necessarily means a whole lot. Many Democrats were pissed at Newsom for what he did, claiming that his actions contributed to an anti-gay marriage backlash at the polls in 2004. And I don’t think a snub four years ago necessarily translates to policy choices. And he might have snubbed Newsom for reasons other than the SF marriages (although I don’t know what those reasons might be). Given that I haven’t seen Clinton particularly go out on a limb for gay people, I think it’s a wash.
Let’s remember who signed Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell into law. Bill Clinton.
The controversy over Obama’s inviting homophobic gospel singer Donnie McClurkin to play a prominent role in one of his campaign rallies a few months back might also have diminished his vote among gay voters.
I’m with you, Jeff, that the two candidates feel like largely a wash on gay issues. While Clinton seems happy enough to say nice things about gay people when speaking in front of gay people but pretty much nowhere else (I can’t even find anything specifically about GLBT issues on her website, while LGBT is a prominent category under the “People” tab on Obama’s), I was impressed that Obama went into a predominantly African-American church to speak and during that speech called them out on their homophobia.
I saw the story in the Chronicle Tuesday morning and it didn’t stop me from going with Obama in the ballot box Tuesday night. Yes, it happened four years ago, and Obama looks to me like he’s come a long way in his thinking since then (if that were even the real issue, as you note, at the time). If anything, it just made me angry that if the story were such a big deal, why did we hear nothing about this until the evening before/morning of the primary? It seemed less like good reporting to me and more like a dirty political ploy.