Oct 31, 2008  |  By: CHRIS JOHNSON  | COMMENTS     

Political experts and polls were predicting that Democratic nominee Barack Obama would enjoy a convincing Election Day victory by taking a majority of the national vote and capturing important battleground states.

In the days remaining before Nov. 4, Obama was enjoying an average lead of about six or seven percentage points over Republican presidential nominee John McCain in national polls.

Obama also leads in battleground states that were seen as crucial for winning the election. In five polls published Monday for Virginia, Obama enjoyed an average lead of 7.8 points.

No Democratic presidential candidate has won Virginia since Lyndon Johnson took the state in 1964.
Polls also gave Obama a small lead in Florida and Ohio — which last went to a Democratic presidential candidate when President Bill Clinton ran for re-election in 1996. Obama also enjoyed a small lead in North Carolina, where no Democratic presidential candidate has won since Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Clyde Wilcox, a straight George-town University professor and author of “The Politics of Gay Rights,” said the 2008 election “looks like a good Democratic year” based on the polls and early voting trends.

“Obama is amazingly well organized, and he is really nailing big endorsements here at the end,” Wilcox said.

Winnie Stachelberg, senior vice president for external affairs for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said, “Obama is running strong” and “is poised to win a significant victory.”

Stachelberg, a lesbian, predicted that Election Day would be “a mandate for progressive change” and provide a new direction in policy “that is absolutely essential for the country” and the gay community.

Hastings Wyman, editor of the Southern Political Report, said he expected Obama to take about 54 percent of the vote.

“If Obama is doing fairly well in the South, that means he should do even better in the rest of the country,” Wyman said. “It’s his most difficult region.”

Wyman, who is gay, said if Obama takes southern states like Virginia and North Carolina, it would mean, “the day of the strong conservative message automatically carrying the day is over.”

“Four to eight years ago, someone like Obama coming close to McCain in some of these states would have been unthinkable, so there’s been a profound change,” Wyman said.

Gay issues ‘invisible’ in presidential campaign

As the presidential campaign came to a close, political observers noted that gay issues, especially the issue of same-sex marriage, did not emerge in this year’s presidential election as a prominent wedge issue.

Wyman said gay issues this year have “been almost invisible” and both parties “have found it useful” to keep attention away from them.

“It’s a potential Achilles’ heel for the Democrats because gay issues can be very unpopular,” he said. “The Republicans, on the other hand, have seen their strong conservative stand on gay issues and abortion and other social things eat away at their margins in the suburbs and among young people.”

Neil Giuliano, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, said “to everyone’s observation, there’s been much less visibility” of anti-gay rhetoric in this election.

“We’ve seen the media scrutinize the anti-gay rhetoric from local and national campaigns more than ever, and that’s probably why we don’t see the large scale use of LGBT issues being used as scare tactics and as much of a wedge issue as we did in 2004,” he said.

Brad Luna, a Human Rights Campaign spokesperson, said gay issues played “much less of a divisive role as they did in 2004.”

Luna recalled how in 2004, while working in Oklahoma for Brad Carson’s failed campaign for the U.S. Senate, political groups and the National Republican Senatorial Committee ran negative ads daily against his candidate on same-sex marriage.

But this year, anti-gay rhetoric on the whole was “not to the level we’ve seen in past presidential elections, and that’s really a good thing for our community,” Luna said.

He noted there were some exceptions. In North Carolina, the state Republican Party distributed mailings accusing Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Kay Hagan of wanting to pursue a “radical homosexual agenda.”

McCain, however, rarely spoke about his opposition to same-sex marriage or his support for proposed state constitutional amendments banning gay nuptials in California, Florida and Arizona.
A notable exception to the campaign’s silence on such issues occurred last week, when Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain’s running mate, told Christian media that she supported the Federal Marriage Amendment.

“I’m not going to be out there judging individuals, sitting in a seat of judgment, telling them what they can and can’t do, should and should not,” she said. “But I certainly can express my own opinion ...