Poll Dancing Again in California

The UPI brings us the latest retread.

A slim majority of 51 percent of likely voters in California favor permitting same-sex marriage in the Golden State, a new Field Poll indicates.

Yes, we’ve heard this before.

The survey results are nearly the same as those of a Field Poll taken six months before Californians approved Proposition 8 in 2008 banning gay marriage, the Sacramento Bee reported Tuesday.

So what does that tell us? Polls like this are unreliable because people lie about how they’ll vote? The wording of the poll question is problematic? Perhaps the sampling group is too small.

Here comes some really important information:

However, support for gay marriage drops to only 44 percent when voters are given the option of civil unions, the newspaper says.

California already has this. California's domestic partners law treats domestic partners as if they were spouses.

The poll of 672 likely voters has an error rate of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

That is too small of a sample.

What happens is that a headline saying something like "majority of Californians support gay marriage" gets widely heard/read. The actual details? Not so much.

What matters most is that both times the voters of California have voted on the matter, they've voted in favor of the bride+groom requirement in state marriage licensing. Licenses are issued on our behalf. We have the legal and moral authority to set the requirements.