Compared to the federal level, gay rights proponents have had more success at the state level, where governments appear more responsive to public opinion on these issues. With tens of thousands of interviews conducted over a one-year span, the 2000 National Annenberg Election Study (NAES) provided the first state-by-state account of public opinion in the United States on gay issues. Table 1 below ranks states by the proportion of respondents who told the NAES that the federal government should "do more" to "stop job discrimination against homosexuals," and indicates state laws on three key gay-related policies—discrimination protection, bans on same-sex marriage, and hate crimes laws that explicitly include gay people.

Two things immediately stand out in this table. First, public opinion on gay rights in America closely follows the much-discussed "red-blue" divide. John Kerry was the victor in the ten states (and the District of Columbia) most in favor of gay rights—California, plus most of New England and the Mid-Atlantic region. George W. Bush won the eleven states least in favor of gay rights—all drawn from the South, the Plains, or the Rockies.

Second, state policy closely follows public opinion: The thirteen states that have adopted antidiscrimination laws are generally those whose residents are most supportive of gay rights, with the exception of increasingly conservative Minnesota and Wisconsin. Many of these states have also shied away from enacting a ban on same-sex marriage. Laws that explicitly punish perpetrators of hate crimes against gays and lesbians are more prevalent (they've been enacted by twenty-nine states and D.C.), but again the pattern of their adoption is predicted quite well by the state-by-state aggregate responses to the NAES question.

We now arrive at the very timely topic of same-sex marriage, and—as was demonstrated in the 2004 elections—the issue is currently a real loser for the gay and lesbian rights movement. In the 2004 National Election Pool (NEP) exit polls, 25 percent of the voters supported same-sex marriages, 37 percent opposed any legal recognition of same-sex relationships, and 35 percent favored civil unions.

Perhaps the extraordinary development here, however, is not that 37 percent of the voters opposed any legal recognition of same-sex relationships. Rather, it is that 60 percent supported some sort of legal recognition of these relationships. Civil unions, unheard of five years before, now enjoy substantial support. While the opposition is intense and vocal, the growth in support for recognition of same-sex relationships is dramatic—even if a majority of Americans is not yet prepared to call them marriages.

Public opinion researchers are familiar with the pattern noted by Samuel Stouffer and many others of support for the abstract principles of democracy combined with opposition to many specific examples of free speech, majority rule, and minority rights. Same-sex marriage presents us with the opposite pattern: We see much more support for giving same-sex couples access to many of the specific benefits of marriage than we see for same-sex marriage. Thus, a 2004 Newsweek poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates found that 60 percent of the public supported both inheritance rights and health insurance benefits for gay spouses, and 55 percent supported Social Security benefits for gay spouses, while the exit poll found only 25 percent in support of same-sex marriage.