Is No On 1 loss due to Obama?

John Aravosis at gay.americablog.com has an interesting account of the interplay between the DNC, the Obama administration, the New Jersey governor's race, and the No On 1 campaign here in Maine.

One very interesting point he makes is that the 2008 presidential race had far more people cast ballots than the 2009 No On 1 race. That's not that much of a surprise - it was an off-year election, after all - but it does raise the question of whether Obama's machine could have made a difference.

By Aravosis's calculation, 122,000 Obama voters didn't cast ballots at all this year. (I'm not certain about his math, but it seems clear that around 150,000 people who voted for either Obama or McCain didn't cast ballots in the No On 1 election. The split is where I lose his chain of logic.)

Anyway, given that 31,000 more No On 1 voters would have turned the tide, and that number is just 1 in 5 of the people who didn't vote at all, it does make some sense that if Obama and the DNC had stepped up and used their voter lists, more people might have shown up at the polls. Maybe not, and it's certainly not a given, but an interesting concept to explore, as the gay community in America wrestles with its opinion of Obama.