Presiding. Truman never learned anything from fdr or from staff. It was a transition with zero knowledge. That doesnt happen anymore. Got a phonecall from the white house, get to the phone right away so he picked up the phone and on the other and they said get to the white house as soon as you can. So he grabbed his hat and dashed out and he had a car of course. They gave him a chauffeur when he was Vice President. Went to the white house and was taken upstairs to the second floor. He was met by eleanor roosevelt, and he looked up and she said harry, the president is dead. He was in total shock and he said, what can i do for you . And she said, harry, what can we do for you . You are in trouble now. Now a forum on how the election affected the lesbian lesbians gay and transsexual population. This is an hour and a half. I have one roll tonight. My job is to welcome you. Thanks for coming tonight. Several months ago when my good friend said to me would you mind posting the postelection panel . I said sure. Proud of having been the First National sponsor of the institute and we have our first real washington event in this very room five years ago. Back then, we had 35, maybe 50 people. Are most devout acolyte, maybe people who want to get our mission out to. Little did we know many months ago that the electorate would have taken an aboutface last week on what seemed to be a relentless march. They keep denying is one aspect of our fundamental civil rights so here we are tonight with a capacity crowd. Thank you all for coming out. And here i am introducing my dear friend the chief executive director and to thank him for his contribution to what i hope is that glorious new era for the Lgbt Community. Clearly Chuck Williams created the Williams Institute but without brads vision, passion and talent, he could never have executed it. [inaudible] [laughter] my dear friend who is on the council, we have been attending these Founders Council meetings for years. Brad would take that out his organizational chart and say how can we build a thinktank to rival our opponents . How do i do it in a way that has real data and sound legal arguments very effectively . Hes so passionate about real data and real legal principles and be found as judge walker told us and chat and i refer to that decision, that if we have real data, we will always counter our foes who are trying to throw bias at the sabrett is passionate about that and that is loud be institute to be so successful in what its done. He has the talent for tracking leading scholars from all over the country in an incredibly successful way so that over the years we have watched brad with his organizational chart and he filled in all the slots and we arrived at where we are today. So i thank you very much for the contribution he has made for us and i will turn it over to him to introduce the panel. Thanks so much, tom. [applause] i want to start out by thanking tom. We were here at the very beginning like he said in this very room and his step with us along the way and thats really important to work here and around the country. I also want to thank matt and for putting together this great panel and doing all the work that gets all of us here in his room for this great commerce station. For the last several elections we have posted these postelection event and its always a little scary because we invite the speakers and before we know the results, so we never quite know where it may lead but everyone is very courageous and you know in 2008 we had a well attended event that was very bittersweet in 2010. No one came. [laughter] so its nice to have all of you this year. Im going to introduce the moderator because we have a fantastic moderator with us this year, peter wallsten. He has a very present career in reporting and i am sure you have all read his work at the wall street journal, back where i live. And l. A. Times and i want to mention in 2006 he coauthored a book called one party nation. The republican plan for dominance in the 21st century so we are very glad that that plan isnt working real well, but that peter is with us tonight to moderate the panel. [applause] thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you for doing this i realize that i was not always easy to find over the last few weeks while you were planning so i apologize about that but i think this will be an exciting event. I think Everybody Knows the panel is here but maybe we can look down the line and you could enter duscher selves very quickly and then lets get started. I am chad griffin president of the human rights campaign. I am subor professor of law at georgetown and a legal scholarship director at the Williams Institute. I am a demographer at the williams. Patrick guerriero. Thanks. Site that we could start off talking about the Election Results because that is on everyones minds and obviously a historic night and a historic election for many reasons that any of everybody in his room already knows, the election of Tammy Baldwin, marriage in four states and the reelection of a president who is locally supported in a historic way on marriage. So i was interested first in maybe going down the panel quickly and each of you saying kind of how you felt that night or the next day. Kind of looking at it from 50,000 feet, what it all means for this movement. Absolutely and once again i want to thank williams for having me here. You all have been at the forefront of this movement for a long time so thank you for having us here. Usually when youre talking about an election and you say afterwards, a new direction, a turning point, its usually spend. The truth is after this election, those are the only word you words you can use to describe what happened on tuesday as it relates to this movement because it really was a clean sweep across the country. I was cautiously optimistic that we were going to win some of these and often talked about it. We were one of the four marriage dates but that would have been history making. We really would have taken the talking point away that is used in and day out. I walk into the meeting and talk about how its morally the right side of the issue to be on an politically its the right side and i will talk about the 16 polls that have us over 50 in terms of the support for Marriage Equality. The opposition walked in and said thats all well and good but they have lost every time the public is voted on this of the movement was focused and came together and winning for the first time. But instead we won all four of them. I will also mention tammy which was historic collecting president obama asked her if you go back to win, leading up to and when he and matt announced his support for Marriage Equality one, yet many people just asking the question what this would mean. Is this going to be good come is this going to be bad quick said we had the doom and gloom scenario suggesting that other politicians follow the president s lead and they will follow at writing to retirement. One of my favorites in which became a pet project of mine and many of you probably got my fundraising for this little race in iowa. Just as wiggins was on the ballot for retention in iowa. The three judges on the Iowa Supreme Court that were up in 2008, the National Organization for marriage spent 1 million to keep them in and they did so by 10 to 15 points. Just as wiggins was the fourth judge on the ballot this november, they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and they campaigned across the state and head bus trips across the state and we went in with some lawyers that were there in the state to partner in the campaign and we saved just as wiggins. We send a message to the judiciary that just because you were in the right side of an issue does not mean youre going to be recalled. That is what they are constantly trying to do, and it was a clean sweep across the country. Im very proud of all the work, and it really was a coming together and working together to achieve these massive victories. I would agree with basically what chadha said that i would add to it is that i have this blog and what i blogged about in terms of the marriage results was, my headline was this is what a Sticking Point looks like and it was interesting to me that in all four of these states, the percentage supporting gay marriage was 52 or 53 which is exactly what the other side god in the prop 84 years ago and so it felt to me like in addition to all the polls you read and the nationwide support, 46 and 51 , the feels to me that these four states in part because they really did come from around the country are the most part, at least from many parts of the country, sort of set this electoral support that is achievable by our side of 52 and i think thats really you know, an important and sort of magnificent kind of victory. I think the other piece of that is that on this issue, and i think this issue will come to be seen as representative more broadly of american politics, where we are seeing a distinct separation between the regions that are more tolerant and more supportive, more progressive and the regions that are less so. The pew trusts came out with a poll, you know sort of tracking region by region with the polls are in terms of this specific issue, support for samesex marriage. So in the same way that we are accustomed to the red and blue and all that sort of stuff, and this is not to say that there arent a lot of purple states where there is plenty of support, i think the marriage has coming to be increased if we increasingly this one off social issue or cultural issue but an issue that is really telling us something, telling the country something about the direction the country is moving in and about the political divisions and where they sit. I am the data geek on the panel so i have to say i was in the trust category so the nate silver blog. I went into those elections, and i had continuously and my friends got to this i had never believed the president ial election was going to be that as. I never believed that obama quite frankly that obama was going to lose so that wasnt actually a surprise to me and i was very confident going into it. But historically on the data side, what chad was talking about on the various marriage foes is that polling had to show up not just majority. Polling always have to show up to even think that we had a shot at voting and so i went into this very nervous about those votes and so obviously i was pleasantly surprised but i have to admit i had a personal stake in the so im one of these people, i got married in canada in 2004. I crossed the border and i wasnt married. I lived in d. C. For a while, moved to california. I was married for a while in california and then i moved to washington and i wasnt married again, and now im about to get married again. [laughter] so, thank you. Hopefully its the same guy. Dont forget that. [laughter] you dont get gifts every time he there. Thats problem. So i did have this very, i certainly had a personal stake in that so i was very pleasantly surprised him outside and i do think also, i want to look at this deeper but it feels to me like this time the disconnect between the power of voting and the actual voting wasnt as big as it was in the past which just the extent that people were saying different things, if that ever was true, it feels like in this race are polling suggested that was kind of the margin and we won by the margins that were fairly close to the polling and i think if thats true thats very good news for us as we go forward with this kind of thinking. I think there was a tendency to feel that we had to really get very high numbers and so that was good news. That was let i was less confident about the racing gary was. The staff certainly said one thing and i live in boston near the romney headquarters of my gut was sensing a lot of confidence coming out of that building. I did have a concession speech prepared for this event as we thought through what this conversation would be like depending on the scenario but i had a few quick questions on Election Night. The first was remembering exactly what it felt like in 2043 had a dozen constitutional amendments passed in the state all across the country. You had karl rove celebrated as the architect who had just built a new kind of republican electoral majority that would have laid the attraction for a decade or two and you had a president who was reelected not because of within the toolkit was the wedge issue lgbt families across the country. A dark moment, kind of the Fetal Movement for the lgbt movement and what i really sensed on Election Night this year was how proud i am about our resilience. We picked ourselves up and we decided to fight ends day and decided to Start Talking to republicans. We decided to demand more from our great democratic friends. A lot of movements could have stayed down and been victims for the next decade like some people predicted so there was a sense of proud and our resilience and our strength and our character to bounce back from that. I think the second reflection i had is that on Election Night in 2008 i spent it at Campaign Headquarters for the prop 8 campaign and watched young boys and girls cry about an election result as they were watching the president give an inspiring and motivational victory. The contrast that night, the disconnect from the nations embrace of the new and visionary president with young people seeing themselves on the ballot in having their own neighbors reject them. I remember the mix of emotion that night for a lot of us in this room and certainly that generation of young people. Kind of the joy associated with Election Night was thinking about those young people who in four states all that saw that they were embraced while the country acrosstheboard didnt put up with the wedge issue of lgbt writes and then the bad news is i woke up the next morning both with a hangover and with a healthy reminder that probably has some big wins and four blue states and the ballot and we elected the president , huge challenges faces. People still get fired for being lgbt. We still have state Health Care Exchanges being designed in many states that at this point dont have all the things we need to make sure our families are protected and cared for by the federal government. There are still great challenges so lets enjoy this moment, celebrated but realized there is tons of work ahead in our opponents are trying to figure out what they did wrong. They will correct themselves so we have to be ready for a big fight. You can asa set the table for the conversation so lets drill down on a few things you have talked about. Gary, this continues in the role as the data geek. Can you talk about the exit polls and what to take away from the lgbt vote and the influences they may or may not have . One of the great things about this election is in the past basically the only thing we have known about the lgbt vote was the exit polls which usually told us what percentage that they were lgbt and how they voted. This year, gallup added an lgbt question to their daily tracking survey in june and collected data on Voter Preferences and continues to. So, for me, one of the fun things that has happened for the lgbt movement and i actually dont think its this is serious is this question is now a permanent question on the Gallup Daily Tracking survey so every night in america 1000 people are asked if they are lesbian, gay or bisexual. See what percentage . About 3. 5 said yes and the exit polling said that 5 of the electorate said yes and so what that allows us to do though is so we had data, have data from june, collected from june through september and for the first time we did and just look at the National Vote that we can start to look at regional and state level votes. What i did was a little analysis, not just how the lgbt vote affected the National Election and certainly from the National Popular vote, it turns out that they lgbt support for obama is about the size of his victory over romney. So you can credibly make the argument that with the popular vote, the lgbt vote, baby huge difference but of course that is not how you win the presidency in the United States. The issue is what it did in the state elections and what i found was really interesting, the same scenario for the popular vote in the National Vote happened for ohio and florida so the lgbt support for obama is bigger in both ohio and florida bandit is winning margin so you can credibly argue that vote mattered a lot and if you think about an election where obama loses ohio and florida, you start to think about a very different election. And then i looked at polls and said what if romney and obama had more the lgbt vote was 76 obama, 20 to two romney and quite frankly it has been about that its been roughly 31. Obama, thats the highest its been quite frankly its been high all through. But what if they split more or less evenly over romney got a little bit more . If romney had 151 of the lgbt vote he would have won ohio, florida and virginia. He would have been within four electoral votes of the presidency. So, in florida all he had to do was win a little over a third of the lgbt vote to win those states. So, while i dont think that in the way that we are not talking about immigration and things that republicans have to rethink their strategy on, i dont think its quite that level of impact but a little bit of movement in the lgbt vote in key states and this election suggests it would have been a very different picture for the National Election, and so while im not willing to say the lgbt vote won the election for obama, what i strongly think is it made a very important difference in the tenor of the election and the majority of the Electoral College and definitely like i said a fairly Modest Movement in that vote in key states. Are if any of you familiar with what kind of targeting the Obama Campaign di