PPIC Poll Says 56% Of CA Likely Voters Support Marriage Equality

Wow! The good polling news on marriage equality just keeps on coming. As this is a presidential election year, it is not surprising that there is a lot of polling going on, and I suspect more and more polls will be including the marriage equality question. Just last week we heard from the Field Poll that 59% of Californians support marriage equality (compared to just 34% who do not), the largest lead (25 points) and highest level of support for same-sex marriage ever recorded in the state by the most trusted name in California polling.

The latest poll is from PPIC and says that 52% of registered voters support allowing same-sex marriage, compared to 41% who don't a margin of +11 for the supporters of equality, which is identical to what the PPIC poll showed last September. Of course the grain of salt here is that the margin of error of the PPIC poll is ±3.8 points, so technically we can not be sure that a majority of registered voters in California support marriage equality. We can however be sure that there are more supporters of marriage equality than people who oppose it.

PPIC also attempts to sample "likely voters," and among this group support for marriage equality is even higher, at 56% with a mere 38%expressing opposition. This is a margin of +18 for the forces for equality. The margin of error on this statistic is ±4.2 points, so this time, according to PPIC, a majority of Californians likely to vote in the June 2012 primary support marriage equality (see figure, below).

Equality California immediately sent out a statement about the new poll which included the graphic at the top of this post highlighting the improvement in the "likely voter" statistic on the question of marriage in the last 3 years.

This was a somewhat curious move, since no one in California is going to be voting on the question of marriage equality anytime soon, since there is no organized effort to put a Proposition 8 repeal measure on the November 2012 ballot due to the fact that the Perry v Brown litigation about the constitutionality of California's same-sex marriage ban is still tied up in the federal courts and is unlikely to be resolved before June 2013 (at the earliest!)

All that being said, two polls within two weeks indicating near-majority support for marriage equality and at the very least significant, double-digit leads for the pro-equality forces are very encouraging and good news!