Gay Support for Jackson in N.Y. Believed Eroded by Question of His Ability to Win

For the Jesse Jackson campaign, New York’s primary vote rebuffed hopes that a rainbow coalition of disparate minorities could come together to form a majority of the Democratic Party.

One of the better locations to see why that strategy did not fully succeed is West 13th Street in Manhattan, at the heart of one of the country’s oldest and largest gay neighborhoods, New York’s Greenwich Village.

Jackson’s campaign had been active in New York’s gay neighborhoods for months. Friday Jackson capped his appeal to the gay community with a huge rally on 13th Street at which he brought several AIDS patients up on stage with him and pledged support for an executive order banning discrimination against gays. “I want to remove the hysteria. I want to affirm people and reach out,” he said.

Task Force Poll

Gay rights organizations, in response, have actively been promoting the idea that much of Jackson’s white, urban support has come from the gay vote. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, for example, one of the oldest gay civil rights groups, earlier this month announced that a poll of its membership showed Jackson leading Dukakis 36% to 22%.

For gay voters “the argument for Jackson was that he was the one candidate who has fully embraced the agenda of the gay and lesbian community and is not afraid to accept the support of the community,” said task force President Jeffrey Levi. “The downside was the electability issue.”

In the end, that downside appears to have largely won out. Although Jackson did better in largely white, predominantly gay precincts than he did among whites statewide, Dukakis carried gay neighborhoods by large margins.

For many gay voters, the choice between Dukakis and Jackson was difficult.

Prosecutor Tells Difficulty

“I went back and forth on this for weeks. I’ve never had a problem like this before,” said Evan Wolfson, a 32-year-old gay prosecutor with the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.

Jackson “was the candidate who was most addressing the issues that were closest to my heart,” Wolfson said, and Dukakis had drawn the ire of some gay activists by supporting legislation in Massachusetts that effectively bars gay couples from adopting foster children. But Dukakis also beats Vice President George Bush in trial polls and Jackson does not, which may have been a more important factor.

An ABC exit poll Tuesday found that of the 3% of respondents who said they were gay, 51% supported Jackson and 37% supported Dukakis. But the difficulty of getting an accurate fix on gay re1936748398finding, ABC pollster Jeffrey Alderman said.

“About all we can say from that is that those who are willing to identify themselves publicly as gay favored Jackson,” Alderman said. By some estimates, 10% of the Democratic vote in New York is gay.

Inaccuracies Possible

Counting votes in key precincts also can introduce inaccuracies, since even the most heavily gay neighborhood is not 100% gay. But even taking that into account, the voting results do not appear to show a gay majority for Jackson.

Jackson won an outright majority in only one of the 47 predominantly gay, mostly white, election districts in New York City which The Times sampled. In a second district, Jackson and Dukakis were tied.

In all the remaining 45 districts, Dukakis beat Jackson, in some cases by margins of 2 to 1 or better. Overall, Dukakis took 55.4% of the vote in the sampled districts to Jackson’s 33.8%. Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr. received 10.7%.

Statewide, Dukakis won 51% of the total vote, contrasted with 37% for Jackson and 10% for Gore.