Poll Finds Record Support for Same-Sex Marriage in California

The same week the Obama administration filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to strike down California’s ban on same-sex marriage, a new Field Poll was released showing that support for same-sex marriage in the state has increased drastically since the ban was passed there a little more than four years ago.

The Field Poll, conducted Feb. 5 to 17 among 834 registered voters, found a record majority of Californians, 61 percent, say they support extending the right to marry to same-sex couples. Just 32 percent were against doing so.

California voters approved the state’s ban on gay marriage, Proposition 8, in November 2008. At the time a Field poll found that 51 percent of registered voters supported same-sex marriage; 42 percent were against it. Still, Proposition 8 passed, 52 percent to 48 percent.

Since 2009, however, support for gay marriage in California has risen sharply. A chart of Field polling from the Bay Area News Group shows the shift:

Another major California pollster, the Public Policy Institute of California, has not surveyed the state about gay marriage since March 2012, but its polling has shown the same trend as the Field Poll. The Pu! blic Policy Institute of California found support for same-sex marriage increased from 44 percent in March 2009 to 54 percent in March 2012. Opposition decreased from 49 percent to 40 percent.

California’s evolving views on same-sex marriage are indicative of a fast-moving shift in attitudes nationwide. In the past few years, support for gay marriage overtook opposition, according to polling, and the trend has continued. In a national CBS News poll of 1,148 adults in early February, 54 percent of respondents said it should be legal for same-sex couples to marry.

In 2011, FiveThirtyEight published a statistical moel that used past ballot initiatives as well as data on religious participation to project the vote share in all 50 states and the District of Columbia on hypothetical ballot measures prohibiting same-sex marriage. The model projected that â€" unlike as in 2008 â€" California voters would have rejected a same-sex marriage ban had it been on the ballot in November 2012.

The latest poll from Field appears to bear that out.

Bertelsmann Acquires Full Control of BMG Music Company

Five years after its last exit from the music industry, Bertelsmann will take control of its restarted music company, BMG Rights Management, in a deal that values BMG at $1.4 billion. The company announced early Friday that it was buying the 51 percent stake of BMG owned by its partner, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.

The companies did not comment further on the deal, which is expected to close in the first half of the year. But a person with direct knowledge of it, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the terms were confidential, said the purchase price was between $700 million and $800 million, including debt.

“We are bringing the music home to our group,” Thomas Rabe, the chairman and chief executive of Bertelsmann, said in a statement. “A few years after our exit from the traditional music business, in association with KKR, we have succeeded in building the world’s fourth- largest music rights management business.”

The deal signals a full return to the music business for Betelsmann, the German media giant that also owns Random House and the magazine publisher, Gruner + Jahr. After building BMG into a global powerhouse in the 1980s and 1990s, Bertelsmann sold most of its music holdings through a series of deals with Sony and Universal in the mid-2000s. Then it restarted BMG in 2008.

With $270 million invested from KKR, BMG then made a string of acquisitions, mostly in music publishing, the side of the business that deals with the copyrights for songwriting and is seen as less vulnerable to the marketplace changes that destabilized the recorded music industry.

“We saw that music was going to make a comeback,” said Philipp Freise, a KKR partner who led the firm’s investment in BMG. “Everybody said music was going to die, but we said music will not die â€" it will grow.”

BMG quickly built a catalog of more than one million songs by musicians ranging from Johnny Cash and Quincy Jones to Duran Duran and Will.i.am of ! Black Eyed Peas. It has also bought some recorded music assets, but lost out on recent major label auctions, including the Warner Music Group in 2011 and the Parlophone Label group, part of EMI, earlier this year.

Mr. Rabe has said that he expects BMG’s annual revenue to grow to more than $640 million in the next four to five years, up from about $390 million in 2012.

Hartwig Masuch, the chief executive of BMG, said in an interview on Friday that with Bertelsmann as its sole owner, the company could be “more aggressive moving forward” in developing its business, particularly with more recorded music rights.

“What we initially envisioned for BMG was an integrated rights company based on nontraditional models,” he said. “The old world was about complex distribution structures. Now you can license multiple users and distributors. The key is not infrastructure but how good are you at monetizing and accounting for those rights.”

The Breakfast Meeting: Rethinking the Nook and Woodward vs. the White House

Barnes & Noble said that it would rein in ambitions for its Nook tablets after a sharp drop in their sales, Leslie Kaufman writes. William Lynch, the company’s chief executive, told analysts that though Barnes & Noble remained devoted to the Nook it would cut advertising and manufacturing of devices. Mr. Lynch said the reformulated Nook strategy would focus more on digital content, sales of which increased 6.8 percent last quarter, and digital education. Barnes & Noble shares rose 3.4 percent to close at $15.74.

Bob Woodward, long a scourge of the right wing and a hero of the news media for breaking the Watergate scandal, reversed those roles somewhat this week after he publicly criticized the White House, Christine Haughney and Brian Stelter report. Poitico, which broke the story, wrote that Mr. Woodward said he felt threatened by an e-mail from a White House official who had yelled at him for half an hour because of an op-ed article he published in The Washington Post last Friday. The news drew cheers from the conservative establishment, but White House reporters said that arguments and shouting were part of the job description â€" Politico published the e-mail exchange on Thursday, which appeared cordial. Mr. Woodward said in an interview Thursday that he never felt threatened, but was still concerned about how the Obama White House handles criticism. Dylan Byers, of Politico, also writes about the story.

The Chrysler Group has joined with “Motown: The Musi! cal” to invigorate its “Imported from Detroit” advertising theme, Stuart Elliott writes. The commercial features Berry Gordy, famed record producer and subject of the musical, leaving the Motown headquarters in Detroit riding in a Motown Edition of a Chrysler 300C sedan, and then arriving at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater on Broadway, where the musical opens April 14, as “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” plays. When he arrives an altered Chrysler slogan, “Imported from Motown,” appears, followed by the words “ ‘Motown: The Musical’ on Broadway March 2013.” The commercial is believed to be the first time that a Broadway show has had such paid national television exposure before it opens in New York.

A Bloomberg Businessweek cover about the housing rebound in the United States that featured artwork showing cartoonish minorities clutching fistfuls of money has drawn accsations of racism, Tanzina Vega writes. Writers for Slate and the Columbia Journalism Review found the cover inappropriate, and Josh Tyrangiel, the magazine’s editor, said “If we had to do it over again we’d do it differently.” Andres Guzman, the artist who produced the cover, said he based it on an assignment about housing and that no racism was intended. “I am Latino and grew up around plenty of mixed families,” Mr. Guzman said. “I simply drew the family like that because those are the kind of families I know.”

The Jonathan Levin High School for Media and Communications in the South Bronx, named after the son of the Time Warner chairman who was murdered by a forme! r student! he had taught in the same building, may be closed by the city, Al Baker reports. In the last few years a number of factors, like the increasing number of students who speak no English, have driven down the school’s graduation rate, and money for extras, including a scholarship in Mr. Levin’s name and baseball field maintenance, has dried up. The school, originally intended to help at-risk students get a start in the fields of media and media studies, would be the latest casualty of the Bloomberg administration’s policy of shuttering schools and replacing them with new ones, critics say.

Can Democrats Turn Texas and Arizona Blue by 2016

Since President Obama’s re-election in 2012, Republicans have worried about what an increasingly diverse electorate will mean for their future as a national party. Democrats, meanwhile, have started talking about turning ruby red states like Arizona and Texas blue.

How worried should Republicans be And how realistic are those Democratic aspirations A new study released on Thursday â€" based on data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey â€" points toward some answers: Republicans should be worried, but Democrats in Austin and Phoenix shouldn’t stock up on confetti just yet.

The study from the left-leaning Center for American Progress, projects the growth in eligible voters in 12 states by 2014 and 2016. The projections â€" which broke down the eligible voter growth by race â€" show that fast-paced minority growth coupled with slow or negative growth among non-Hispanic whites has a substantial impact on the eligible voter makeup of the 12 states that the center examined.

According to the center’s projections, half a million Hispanics will be newly eligible to vote in Florida in 2016. Over the same period, fewer than 125,000 new white voters will be eligible in Florida. In Arizona, more than 175,000 Hispanics will enter the voter pool as roughly 10,000 white voters leave it. In Texas, 185,000 new white eligible voters will be overwhelmed by the roughly 900,000 Hispanics expected to enter the electorate.

The report â€" by Pat! rick Oakford, a research assistant, and Vanessa Cárdenas, the director of the the center’s Progress 2050 â€" chose states that were crucial electoral battleground, home to rapid nonwhite population growth, or both. In each state the center analyzed, the white share of eligible voters decreased in 2014 and again in 2016.

Source: Progress 2050, Center for American Progress

The center used the the American Community Survey’s one-year population estimates to work out the annual growth rate for each demographic group from 2008 to 2011. It then projected that into 2014 and 2016. The projections assume that each demographic group will grow or shrink by the same percentage each year. That means that groups tht are growing, like Hispanics, will have rising numbers of new eligible voters each year (like compounding interest).

Of course, there is inherent uncertainty in forecasting population change. It’s possible that minority growth could be more linear. That is, the number of Hispanics that enter the eligible voter pool each year could remain constant instead of increasing. Hispanic and Asian-American growth may even slow. Then again, it could exceed these forecasts.

But more important, a change in the eligible voter population is not the same as a change in the likely voter population.

So what would the 2012 presidential election have looked like with the more diverse electorate projected by the Center for American Progress The impact is not as big as might be implied by the change in the eligible voter makeup.

The number of new, nonwhite eligible voters may be staggering, but not all those eligible voters actually go to the polls. There are not yet solid turnout rate estimates! for thes! e demographic groups for 2012 (that will come in the spring, when the Census Bureau publishes it biannual supplement on voting). But according to a Pew analysis of the Census Bureau’s report on the 2008 election, the turnout rate that year was 66 percent for non-Hispanic whites, 50 percent for Hispanics, 65 percent for blacks and 47 percent for Asian-Americans.

While there are indications that Hispanic, African-American and Asian-American turnout increased in 2012, it still lagged far behind that of non-Hispanic whites.

As a result, the fast-growing Hispanic andAsian-Americans communities continue to “punch below their weight.” For example, if a Democrat wins 70 percent of the Hispanic vote (roughly what Mr. Obama earned nationally in 2012) but just half of eligible Hispanics go to the polls, then a Democrat gains a net of only two votes over their Republican opponent for every 10 new eligible Hispanic voters.

If we rerun the 2012 election with the center’s new eligible voters added in, and apportion the voters in each demographic group to Mitt Romney and Mr. Obama according to exit polls, we can get a rough sense for how big an effect these new voters might have.

For states where the 2012 exit poll results of some demographic groups were not reported because of small sample size, that demographic group’s partisan breakdown was determined according to the national exit polls. Exit polls were not conducted in Alabama, Georgia, New Mexico or Texas.

Sources: Center for American Progress, 2012 Exit Polls, Pew 2008 Turnout Rates.

The more diverse electorate solidifies Mr. Obama’s advantage in several crucial battleground states. He gains a single percentage point in Colorado, Iowa and Virginia, three states that are usually close enough that percentage point can swing an election. Mr. Obama’s margin of victory in Florida grows from almost 75,000 to more than 300,000.

Nevada, following the path of New Mexico, moves from looking like a battleground state to a more blue one. And North Carolina shifts from going marginally to Mr. Romney to essentially a tossup. With the new voters, M.. Obama would have carried the Tar Heel State by about 20,000 votes.

But while Mr. Obama gains several percentage points in Arizona and Texas, both remain firmly in Mr. Romney’s column. Moreover, the Texas projections are likely somewhat generous toward Democrats. There were no exit polls in Texas in 2012, so the new voters were apportioned according to national exit polls. In the past, however, Texas Hispanics have been less overwhelmingly Democratic leaning than the national average.

So while the continued growth of minority voters is likely to harden the Democrats’ advantage in vital swing states, it is far less likely in the near future to upend the entire game board by putting Texas’s 38 electoral votes and Arizona’s 11 in play.

One wildcard may be immigration reform. If legislation is passed that gives some undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship, millions of new minority ! voters mi! ght enter the electorate. The most significant influxes are likely to come in Texas and Arizona (although even if legislation is passed, it is unlikely to go into effect in time to affect the 2016 election).

The other variable is turnout. Democrats could speed the rate at which Arizona and Texas become competitive if they could accelerate the rise of Hispanic turnout rates. So far, however, Hispanic turnout has increased incrementally.

Still, that should be small comfort to Republicans with Oval Office ambitions. Mr. Obama won re-election comfortably in 2012 without Texas and Arizona, and in many critical swing states, the demographic trend is moving â€" slowly â€" away from the G.O.P.