What Doesn't a Thinker’s Party Project Look Like?

In our founding manifesto we say, “All plans for social change must be grounded in circumstances as they exist now, with the flexibility to adapt to circumstances as they will likely be tomorrow. Good intentions do not excuse poor execution or ineffective planning, and can harm progress towards goals across the board.” This is an extremely important point because it is the bedrock upon which our future success stands. As a case study, let us examine the “No to Proposition 8” campaign in California during this last election cycle. It is notable both for the national attention it received in the lead up to the election and the fallout of its passage.

To catch up anybody unfamiliar with the subject, Proposition 8 was written as a ban for same-sex marriage to be included in the California constitution after the California Supreme Court ruled that under the current constitution same-sex marriage was legal. This set off a great deal of national coverage and two huge campaigns, one in favor of Proposition 8 and banning same-sex marriage, the other opposed. On Election Day Proposition 8 passed dramatically. Polling showed that roughly 70% of African-American voters, who’d turned out in record numbers to vote for Barak Obama, also voted for Proposition 8. This in turn has lead to backlash against the African-American community for alleged hypocrisy on civil rights issues, and counter-backlash against the gay community for failure to reach out to minority groups.

The point interesting to examine here is that the backlash and counter backlash are based on a fiction created through improper reading of CNN’s exit polls. In this presentation of the results voters are broken out by a particular demographic such as race, political affiliation or religious beliefs, and then how they voted on Proposition 8 by percentage. Based on their polling, CNN claims that 10% of the electorate was African-American. Before drawing conclusions based on polling data, it is always advisable to check for how representative of reality the poll is. There is a posting on Daily Kos that refutes the percentage in detail by looking at the actual number of potential African-American voters in California, but there is a much more important point to be made from the polling data. According to SFGate Proposition 8 won by over half a million votes with the margins at 52.5 versus 47.5. That implies a minimum total electorate for Proposition 8 of 10,000,000. Using that number we get the following number of “yes” votes for each racial category: White – 3,213,000, African-American – 700,000, Latino – 846,000, Asian – 306,000, and Other – 147,000) bringing the total number of “yes” votes to 5,212,000, or right in the range the current counts indicate.

The important information in that data missing from the discussion over whether the African-American community or the No to Prop 8 campaign is to blame for the proposition’s passage is that the White, African-American and Latino communities each have enough “yes” votes to make up the difference between passage and defeat. Of the three groups, African-American’s have the fewest “yes” votes implying that whites and Latinos were more important communities for the No to Prop 8 campaign to focus on since they provided bigger hurdles.

There is a great deal of room for analyzing where the No to Prop 8 campaign could have improved their strategy for a different result, and effective outreach to the African-American community is likely a component of that. Anybody looking to work on a similar effort would be strongly advised to invest the time in that examination.

Despite that, the most important lesson for the Thinker’s Party lies in the post-election, and particularly the post exit-poll release portion of the story. What was framed as a civil rights issue on one side and a moral issue on the other is now completely obscured in blame, recriminations, and declarations that the whole argument is a secondary issue. This is a major setback for the No Prop 8 campaign. Where before they had to make the case that their cause transcended moral or religious concerns into being an issue of equal treatment under the law, they now have an insulted and angry group formerly poised for conversion based on shared political alliances and mutual struggle for justice. It is likely that those are 700,000 votes that are reaffirmed in their conviction, and therefore less likely to eat away at their 500,000 margin.

No reforming group can afford to throw away potential allies out of carelessness and a failure to examine poll data past its superficial presentation. This is the sort of poor decision-making the Thinker’s Party is dedicated to preventing. Perfection is forever elusive, but in making this a founding principle of our cause we guard ourselves against making the mistakes we see others from others.