John Green, director of the University of Akron's Ray C. Bliss Institute for Applied Politics, predicts that Missouri's vote will be replicated in other Midwestern states, including Ohio, though not necessarily in more liberal states, such as Oregon.
More predictive than partisanship, says Green, is religion, which accounts for much of the high turnout in Missouri. Churches urged congregations to vote and, as even nonbelievers grudgingly might concede, prayer has been known to work wonders. All of which probably bodes ill for Democrats and John F. Kerry.
If you want to know how people are going to vote, a reliable rule is, watch what they do on their day of worship. Do they head out for church/temple, or to Lowe's?
Given that religious people tend to vote more often than secularists - and given that secularists tend to vote more often for Democrats - a high turnout of religious Americans committed to preserving traditional marriage could be a boon to President George W. Bush.
Aha, just as planned, those sneaky Republicans. They created a wedge issue out of same-sex marriage in order to motivate those wacky (homophobic, bigoted, gay-bashing) right-wingers to vote in greater numbers and keep those multihued, tolerant, peace-loving Democrats out of the White House.
I don't doubt that the right wing of the Republican Party is home to a few of those both wacky and parenthetically described, but the same-sex issue wasn't invented by Bush or the right wing. It was manufactured by the Massachusetts courts when judges ruled in favor of same-sex marriage.
The fact that so many voters, both Democrat and Republican, turned out in Missouri suggests that Americans want to have a voice in the marriage debate. Bush may benefit from extra voters mobilized by the issue, but credit for the wedge will belong to the activists and judges who forced silent Americans to speak up at the polls.