The Adorkable Nate Silver Forecasts Acceptance of Gay Marriage

With gay marriage in the news thanks to Iowa and Vermont, my mathlete-crush Nate Silver has started looking at how far gay couples have come in the past few years.

First, in light of the Iowa Supreme Court's decision, Silver looked at how states voted when it comes to amending the state constitution to ban gay marriage. He determined that religion can be used to predict how strongly voters support these amendments and estimated that support for these amendments drops by 2 percentage points each year. From there, he projects the first year each state can be expected to reject a constitutional ban on gay marriages.

Silver's predictions include good news for Iowa's same-sex couples -- by the time an Amendment could be put before Iowa voters, they'd be unlikely to support it. Someone has taken Silver's data and made a map to communicate his conclusions visually. Keep in mind that he's only projecting when we can expect a state to reject a ban on gay marriage, not when we'd see them enact gay marriages.

But that's not the end of Silver's look at gay marriage.

In light of the District of Columbia's move to recognize gay marriages conducted out-of-state, Silver disagreed with the idea that this was an opportunity for Republicans. Noting that this particular case also brings up a states' rights issue, Silver argued that Americans may be willing to ban gay marriages in their own state, but are less likely to support forcing that view on other states. Thus, he says, Congress shouldn't step in to undo the DC Council's decision.

Today, Silver took The Weekly Standard to task for wrongly saying that support for marriage equality stopped growing when Massachusetts started letting gay couples marry. Taking a look at a variety of surveys, Silver charted increasing support for gay marriages and civil unions. To be fair, the Standard could have been honestly mistaken and not deliberately deceptive. Silver uses a more comprehensive set of data to come up with a more accurate conclusion -- which means that, once again, Silver is demonstrating how not to write about statistics.

If the trend continues, Silver predicts support for gay marriage should pass the 50% mark in the next decade. Considering Silver's history of accuracy, he's just served a bucketload of good news for gays.