What happened?
An incredible number of incredible people put in a lot of time and money for the cause of marriage equality, but on this day, while the Internet revisits the story of Prop 8 through this wonderful all-star piece of musical theater, I found Rolling Stone’s postmortem a pretty fascinating read.
Prop 8 should have been defeated — two months before the election, it was down 17 points in the polls — but the gay-rights groups that tried to stop it ran a lousy campaign. According to veteran political observers, the No on Prop 8 effort was slow to raise money, ran weak and confusing ads, and failed to put together a grass-roots operation to get out the vote.
“This was political malpractice,” says a Democratic consultant who operates at the highest level of California politics. “They fucked this up, and it was painful to watch. They shouldn’t be allowed to pawn this off on the Mormons or anyone else. They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and now hundreds of thousands of gay couples are going to pay the price.”
I’ve been unable to shake the haunting feeling that it was partially a problem of marketing on the part of the No on 8 campaign. Why is it that I, who was cognizant of and invested in the fight from relatively early on, never once saw the simple, efficient and evocative slogan “H8” (pictured above) until the day after the election? What a tragic missed opportunity. Was the No campaign timid about alienating the hatemonger constituency? Branding like this could’ve gone a long way in forestalling the potential confusion of voters as to what a No vote or a Yes vote really meant. What has more inherent impact and meaning to a voter: “No on 8” or “No on H8”? Not to oversimplify, and not to discount the efforts of the many amazing No on 8 volunteers, but it seems from the Rolling Stone article, that an oversight like this could be emblematic of the rest of the campaign.
via Mat Honan
