Editor's note: Daily through Jan. 25, ADN will publish poll results showing how Alaskans feel about topics ranging from the Affordable Care Act and President-elect Donald Trump's transition to crime and the opioid crisis.
Alaska appears to be far less socially conservative than some might think. On one of the signature social conservative issues — same-sex marriage — Alaskans are strongly supportive, according to a public opinion poll conducted among 750 people last month for Alaska Dispatch News by Ivan Moore's Alaska Survey Research.
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Statewide, 69 percent of respondents say it should be legal for same-sex couples to wed, while 23.5 percent are opposed. In Anchorage — where the Assembly has passed a law guaranteeing some rights for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual communities, and where opponents are proposing a ballot measure to weaken the law — support for same-sex marriage is even higher than the state at large: 75.8 percent say same-sex marriage should be legal. In every other area of the Alaska, a majority supports same-sex marriage, with Southeast holding an even bigger margin than Anchorage at 76.3 percent.
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Support dips among Republicans, but even at 49.8 percent, Republicans who believe same-sex marriage should be legal outnumber the 40.9 percent of those who would make it illegal.
See the full set of questions and cross tabs for this survey question here. The poll was conducted as part of the quarterly Alaska Survey.
The Alaska Survey is a statewide public opinion survey project consisting of 750 interviews with randomly selected Alaskans aged 18+. 500 interviews are conducted on cellphones, 250 on landlines. With the exception of rural Alaska, all numbers for this study are generated randomly onto the set of active Alaska telephone prefixes, with no calling done to lists or phone book records. Survey completions are apportioned appropriately by geographic area in Alaska, and collected data is weighted to make the sample representative of the Alaska population by gender, ethnicity and age, according to latest Census estimates, and also by land/cell phone status. The full sample of 750 (MOE +3.6%) contains a subsample of 624 registered voters (MOE +3.9%).
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