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LOU CHIBBARO JR.
Friday, November 26, 2004
Dave Noble, executive director of the National Stonewall Democrats, announced
on Nov. 19 that he is stepping down from his job in February, two years after
beginning his tenure as head of the nation’s largest group of gay Democrats.
Noble said his departure was unrelated to the Democratic Party’s losses
in the November election or his group’s inability to persuade significantly
more of the 25 percent of gays who voted for President Bush in 2000 to switch
their votes to Democrat John Kerry in 2004.
“By growing our staff, increasing our budget and launching dynamic programs,
we have transformed National Stonewall Democrats into a vital organization that
plays an important role in our movement,” Noble said. “I feel truly
that I’ve done what I wanted to do.”
Added Noble, “Although our achievements have been personally satisfying,
I feel it is time to find new opportunities that will challenge me in different
ways.”
In a statement announcing Noble’s resignation, the group said it would
begin a national search to find Noble’s replacement. Noble said he has
yet to line up a new job.
“I have several options for where I will go,” he said.
David Meadows, president of the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club of D.C., said
gay Democratic activists familiar with NSD have credited Noble with placing
the national group on sound financial and organizational footing after Noble’s
predecessors struggled to keep the group solvent.
The Stein Club is one of more than 100 gay Democratic groups that make up NSD’s
chapters across the country.
The NSD statement said the group’s chapters increased from 70 to more
than 100 under Noble’s tenure. The statement said Noble also helped organize
a network of gay Democratic activists on more than 70 college campuses.
Meadows and Stein Club board member Claire Lucas, who also serves on the NSD
board, said Noble’s organizational and fund-raising abilities have resulted
in a record NSD budget of $600,000 this year, up from $250,000 at the time he
became head of the group in 2003. The group’s staff increased from two
to four full-time members under Noble’s tenure.
Noble said the group raised and spent about a half million dollars in the 2003-2004
election cycle, with most of those funds earmarked for increasing the turnout
of gay voters for Kerry in key battleground states.
He said the group shifted its past emphasis from contributing funds to pro-gay
candidates for Congress through a political action committee, to building a
grassroots-oriented get-out-the-vote operation through the formation of a sister
group called the Stonewall Democrats United. The latter group is a 527 organization,
a new form of campaign group that both Democrats and Republicans have created
under a loophole in the federal election law to circumvent campaign-spending
limits. The 527 organizations must be legally independent from the candidates
they seek to help.
Noble said he believes NSD achieved its goals in the 2004 election, despite
the fact that Kerry lost to Bush, Republicans increased their majorities in
the House and Senate, and voters in 11 states passed, by lopsided margins, constitutional
amendments banning same-sex marriage.
Some gay activists dispute this assessment, saying NSD and gay Democratic activists
working on the Kerry campaign failed in their efforts persuade more gays to
vote for Kerry.
During the Democratic National Convention in July, Eric Stern, director of
the Democratic Party’s gay outreach office, predicted that gay Democrats
would help the Kerry campaign boost Kerry’s share of the gay vote to 85
percent, from the 70 percent of the gay vote that went to Democrat Al Gore in
2000. Stern said gay Democrats would accomplish this by chipping away at Bush’s
share of the gay vote, which came to 25 percent in 2000.
An exit poll conducted on Election Day this year by a consortium of television
news networks and newspapers found that out of the 4 percent of the electorate
that identified itself as gay, lesbian or bisexual, 77 percent said they voted
for Kerry and 23 percent reported voting for Bush. Although Kerry received the
lion’s share of the gay vote, some critics note that Kerry and his gay
Democratic supporters were unable to wrest away a significant amount of the
gay vote that Bush received in 2000.
The exit poll this year shows that Kerry’s boost in the gay vote from
70 percent in 2000 to 77 percent this year came largely from gays who voted
in 2000 for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader rather than from gays who voted
for Bush.
Noble and other gay Democratic activists have said gay Democrats, working closely
with the Kerry campaign and the Democratic National Committee, helped turn out
far more gay voters for Kerry this year than the number that turned out for
Gore four years ago. Noble and his gay Democratic colleagues acknowledge that
Bush won the election this year by turning out more core or “base”
Republican voters than Kerry was able to match among key Democratic constituencies,
including gays.
“Our goal was not so much to educate gay Republicans,” Noble said.
“If LGBT voters were going to vote for Bush on non-gay issues, we were
not going to win them over because the LGBT issues were very clear,” he
said.
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