How Republicans Carried Maryland’s Same-Sex Marriage Referendum to Victory
Walter Olson, Cato Institute:
Last week I observed that Question 6, the same-sex marriage law, had racked up strong vote totals in many Republican areas of Maryland and even carried two big GOP-leaning counties. When I wrote that piece I was working from broad county-level election returns. Now that I’ve had a chance to dig into the precinct-level returns, I can report that the story is bigger than I had realized. From the county numbers we knew that many Romney voters in Maryland must have crossed over to support same-sex marriage; now it turns out that Question 6 actually carried many of the state’s best-known GOP strongholds. Republicans voted for Question 6 in serious numbers around all the state’s major centers of population: in the Baltimore and Annapolis areas, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and in Frederick. And while the trend showed itself everywhere from small farm towns to blue-collar suburbs, it appears to have been strongest in the best-educated and most economically successful Republican communities.
The country is changing. If the Republican Party doesn’t change as well, it risks its very existence.