6 July 2010
Can Pot Legalization Help Dems at Polls?
Posted by Connor under: Politics .
If it is indeed true that pro marijuana legalizations initiatives benefit Democratic candidates in the same way that anti gay marriage initiatives benefited Republicans, then I see no reason whatsoever why progressives should not pursue this at every opportunity.
Naturally just like the gay marriage “strategy” the party’s elected leaders will pretend to be scandalized and run to distance themselves from these “outside the mainstream” initiatives. All the while while enjoying the benefits of the extra two or three percent on their bottom lines.
via Joshua Green at the Atlantic:
The idea that this helps Democrats is based on the demographic profile of who shows up to vote for marijuana initiatives–and wouldn’t show up otherwise. “If you look at who turns out to vote for marijuana,” says Jim Merlino, a consultant in Colorado, which passed initiatives in 2000 and 2006, “they’re generally under 35. And young people tend to vote Democratic.” This influx of new voters, he believes, helps Democrats up and down the ticket.
The legalization movement appears to be gaining steam. As many as a half dozen states could consider the issue this fall. If the correlation Merlino describes really exists, then Democrats will have an advantage in those states. Does it?
Political scientists disagree about whether gay marriage bans helped Republicans, though a growing body of scholarship suggests that they probably did. So far, nobody has measured marijuana’s effect at the polls. But Stephen Nicholson, a leading expert on ballot initiatives at the University of California at Merced, told me that he plans to. What’s more, he sees an intriguing precedent in the nuclear freeze initiatives of 28 years ago, which he has studied. “In the 1982 midterms, 10 states had ballot initiatives on the nuclear freeze,” Nicholson told me. “This had a significant positive effect on Democratic candidates.”
Green has a bit more on the phenomenon/possible strategy in a slightly longer article here. And there is a full cover story in the National Journal this month on the growing movement to revisit marijuana’s status as a controlled substance. But you’ll need to subscribe or run to your local library to read that one.
As a tactic would it be dirty and underhanded? Sure. But they called Karl Rove a genius for doing the same thing with gay marriage. This might actually do some social good. Win-Win I say.