Rob Portman's reversal might have met a different reaction a few years ago. GOP elite vs. base on gay marriage

Not too long ago, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman’s endorsement of gay marriage would have sent a shockwave through the Republican Party. A cautious former Bush administration official, onetime VP short-lister and current vice chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee – breaking ranks on this?

Far from touching off a Beltway political firestorm, Portman’s announcement that he has a gay son and now supports same-sex marriage drew a muted or even positive response from his fellow members of the Republican elite.


The reality Portman’s flip-flop exposed is this: among the Republican political community, the people who actually run campaigns and operate super PACs, support for gay marriage is almost certainly a solid majority position. Among strategists born after the end of the Vietnam War, it’s not even a close call.

( Also on POLITICO: Portman for gay marriage after son comes out)

In fact, some operatives who might have been in damage-control mode over Portman a few cycles earlier were publicly applauding the Ohio senator on Friday morning.

“I respect differing opinions on the topic, but it’s pretty difficult for me personally to disagree with any of this,” NRSC communications director Brad Dayspring wrote on Facebook, with a link to Portman’s revelatory op-ed in the Columbus Dispatch.

He elaborated in an email, emphasizing that he spoke only for himself and not for the committee.

“Very decent people have very different opinions on the issue, whether it’s generational or because of their geographic or religious background,” Dayspring told POLITICO. “Religious beliefs aside, I’m a conservative because of a belief in individual liberty, thus it’s difficult for me to accept that the federal government should have the right or authority to prevent any of my gay friends or family members from the ability to share their life with the person they love through a secular marriage.”

Dayspring – a former senior aide to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor – is hardly alone.

Polls show that the base of the Republican Party remains opposed to gay marriage, though open to civil unions between partners of the same sex. Some of Portman’s colleagues struck a moderate tone on marriage over the last week: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said the definition of marriage should be a state issue, while libertarian-leaning Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul floated the idea of removing marriage from the tax code and freeing adults to make marriage-like contracts for legal and financial purposes.

( Also on POLITICO: Gingrich: No gay marriage evolution)

But the GOP’s professional elite is way past that point. In Washington D.C., it is probably more acceptable to favor gay marriage as a Republican consultant than to oppose it. The result is a Republican leadership class that’s sharply at odds, culturally, with the voters their party aims to lead.

A vivid illustration came just a few weeks ago, when in late February a throng of top Republican politicos signed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to support a constitutional right to gay marriage. Among them were a half-dozen senior aides to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, which officially took the view that marriage is exclusively between one man and one woman.

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, who opposed gay marriage in their campaigns for president and governor of California, respectively, also signed on to the amicus brief. So did several of the GOP’s most ubiquitous media strategists, including Alex Castellanos, Mike Murphy and Mark McKinnon.

( Also on POLITICO: NOM aide attacks Portman reversal)

David Kochel, a top Romney adviser who steered his Iowa caucus campaign, said his endorsement of the amicus brief wasn’t even controversial in his professional circle.

“A majority of the consultants that I know would be for marriage equality and civil marriage,” Kochel said. “When I made a public statement about this, not everybody I knew reached out to me. But of the people who did, the comments ran 25 to 1 favorable.”

He continued: “I know there are a number of elected officials who would like to take the position but aren’t quite ready to. I think it takes time. I think it takes time and electoral success.”

( PHOTOS: 25 gay-rights milestones)

Another Republican who signed the amicus brief underscored the generational nature of the party’s shifting marriage views. It’s not merely that Republican consultants are a couple degrees more liberal than their party across the board, this strategist said. There’s a unique quality to the marriage issue that sets it apart from other cultural flashpoints, such as abortion.

“I think you would be hard-pressed to find a member of the GOP professional class who is under 40 and is opposed to marriage equality. I don’t believe that change of view translates into the abortion debate,” this Republican said.

On top of the generation gap, Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson said there are other cultural factors separating the GOP’s political practitioners from their conservative constituents.

“While age is an obvious factor that relates to views on the issue of gay marriage, so too does income, education level, living in the Northeast. If you think about many political consultants being upper-income Northeastern folks, then that might contribute to them [leaning] more favorably toward gay marriage than Republicans more broadly,” said Anderson, who supports gay marriage.

The perception that the GOP upper crust looks down on social conservatism isn’t a new one: cultural conservatives have grumbled for years that the Republican moneyed elite cares more about keeping capital gains taxes low than protecting the unborn.

And if the marriage debate is changing with exceptional speed, it’s not the only cultural issue where upscale Republicans generally find themselves closer to the center than the rank-and-file activists of their party.

Strap a Washington-based Republican political consultant into a polygraph, and overwhelmingly you’ll find someone who favors comprehensive immigration reform, would likely accept some modest changes to current gun laws and thinks that right-wing primary candidates are among the biggest tactical problems facing the GOP.

That’s not to say that they’re wrong (or that they’re right), or that the GOP base is ultraconservative on all those issues. But if the hardest-line Republican voters suspect that party leaders in Washington don’t necessarily share all their political priorities – well, there’s something to that.

“The political consulting class in the Republican Party is, and has been for a long time, well to the left of the Republican voters. Whether folks like that or not, it’s just plain true,” said GOP strategist Curt Anderson, no squish himself.

Republican media consultant Nick Everhart, whose Ohio-based firm has worked for a number of the most conservative Senate candidates during the past few cycles, said there’s clearly a “disconnect” between the party in D.C. and the base in the states.

“It’s clear that a number of the institutions in Washington aren’t cognizant of the fact that there is a disconnect and they’re on the polar opposite side of where the GOP primary electorate is,” Everhart said. “It’s going to continue leading to disagreement and rancor with the base.”

Actual elected officials are more skittish about getting crosswise with the party base on a central values issue like marriage. Of all the signatories to the pro-gay marriage amicus brief, only one was a Republican who actually has to face the voters in a remotely competitive election: New York Rep. Richard Hanna. There are others sympathetic to the same-sex marriage cause, or at least utterly indifferent to the outcome, but they’ve kept quiet so far.

Portman – himself a former staffer who came up through the ranks of the Washington GOP establishment – could have been speaking for any number of other Republicans when he suggested to CNN that he’d been largely disengaged from the marriage debate since joining the Senate.

“I’m on the Budget Committee, the Finance Committee for a reason. Those have always been my primary issues and my focus,” he said. “This is where I am for reasons that are consistent with my political philosophy, including family values, including being a conservative who believes the family is a building block of society.”

Whatever consultants’ personal feelings about issues like gay marriage, there’s little indication so far that Republican strategists are any less willing to consult for candidates who stump for the opposite view.

Unless that changes, Republicans say, there’s a limit to the actual impact that socially liberal-minded operatives might have. Discreet cheering for Portman isn’t about to transform the Republican Party.

“While the consultants may be ready [to support gay marriage] and while younger people may be ready, their bosses aren’t – the candidates. If you’re a consultant, it’s not your job to be publicly ahead of your candidate on an issue,” said one youthful GOP strategist. “The consultants can vote independently and how they like, but if they’ll still continue to work for candidates who are socially conservative, it’s their job to elect the candidate as-is.”