Pollster Emily Ekins said on Monday that the past positions on gay marriage of former President Obama and Hillary Clinton would be disqualifying factors if either were running for president as a Democrat today.
“What’s interesting is that President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s positions on this issue in 2008, would just be completely disqualifying,” Ekins, director of polling at the Cato Institute, told host Jamal Simmons on “What America’s Thinking.”
“In fact, I think a lot of people would want to have them fired from their jobs for having that position,” she continued. “That’s a pretty short amount of time from which these attitudes have changed, and I think a lot of people have just been a little bit surprised by how fast those views have changed on the Democratic side.”
Obama and Clinton publicly voiced their support for same-sex marriage in 2012 and 2013.
The former president has previously said he opposed same-sex marriage due to his “religious traditions” but questioned those views in his memoir “The Audacity of Hope.”
He later celebrated the Supreme Court Decision in 2015 making same-sex marriage legal across the U.S.
Clinton also celebrated the landmark decision, but when she was running for Senate in 2000, she told reporters at a news conference that she believed marriage was between a man and a woman.
— Julia Manchester
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