Anti-Gay Campaign Could Face A Fight More Idahoans Are Opposed To Initiative, Public Survey Shows

An independent public opinion survey released on Wednesday suggests that despite its near-victory in 1994, the Idaho Citizens Alliance may face a more antagonistic electorate in its 1996 campaign to enact an anti-gay initiative.

But Alliance founder Kelly Walton discounted the appearance of a trend against the proposition.

The sixth annual Idaho Public Policy Opinion Survey, conducted this winter by the Boise State University Survey Research Center, found only 38 percent of the respondents who went to the polls last November said they voted for the initiative even though it polled 49.6 percent of the vote.

Center Director David Scudder said the seeming contradiction could be the result of “selective memory” in which the respondents, knowing the outcome of the election and the events and rhetoric that followed it, expressed the way they wish they had voted.

And when coupled with the survey’s results on pre-election public opinion on the anti-gay initiative, there appears to be growing opposition to the prohibition against state or local laws protecting homosexuals from discrimination.

In the survey conducted in the fall of 1993, 57 percent of those with a position on the issue said they favored the anti-gay initiative.

A year later when the polls closed, just under 50 percent voted for it, and the new survey of 572 people conducted in late February and early March found just 38 percent saying they supported Proposition One.

The poll of randomly selected respondents statewide had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

In addition, 44 percent opposed legislative action to implement any of the provisions of the initiative, which included a ban on homosexual marriages, not currently legally recognized in the state.

Walton suggested, however, that as with polls preceding last fall’s election that showed Proposition One being decisively defeated, respondents may have again not been candid about their feelings.

“The biggest factor in polling on this issue is that the people planning on voting yes don’t really want anybody to know they’re voting yes or why they’re voting yes,” he said. “And there is an intimidation factor on this. They don’t know who the pollster is and they don’t want to wind up having retribution go against them.”

Walton is currently considering whether to modify his new initiative in response to criticism from Attorney General Alan Lance before beginning to collect the 41,335 registered voter signatures needed to put it on the November 1996 ballot.