President Obama opposes same-sex marriage — at least that is what he has always claimed. Hard to see how he could have weighed in on Question 1.

What were the national folks supposed to do? The No campaign had plenty of money. More folks from away telling Mainers what they should do would not have been effective.

The reality is that gay marriage has been voted down everywhere it has been on the ballot. Gay marriage proponents convinced themselves that Maine would be different, but it wasn’t. I don’t think there was anything that could have been done in the campaign to change that.

You missed the point of the article. First off – Politico chose the headline, not me… voter turnout wasn’t the point of the piece.

The piece actually had nothing to do with physical TURNOUT, mobilizing the vote, or anything like that. It was about the mobilization of an effective campaign that was able to persuade middle Maine to vote no instead of yes.

In other words, an extremely popular (in Maine) president and his titanic organizing mechanism completely checked out of this fight, and as a result, all of those middle of the road centrist/indy/up for grabs votes – specifically in the burbs and surrounding communities, ended up not being mobilized for no, but instead were convinced by yes.

That’s the overarching point. It isn’t that the no folks didn’t have enough busses driving people to the polls, and didn’t make enough phone calls… it was that their job of persuasion was anemic, and it was made anemic by a White House and national organization that had no interest in the fight at all.

Failing to turn out the vote was a somewhat misleading headline, but it still does hold true… they didn’t turn out the vote from their side… instead, Yes turned out the vote for theirs.

Now, had the national players come in and actually helped, would no have won? Not sure – they very well could still have lost. Hindsight being 20/20, I’d probably still actually bet on no losing… but no one will ever get me to believe it would have been the 30,000 vote wollup that we saw two days ago.

From my observations in Maine, the No campaign had a good GOTV operation. Their problem was that there just wasn’t enough people who agreed with them to turn out.