I hate questions asking whether people are “more or less likely to vote” for a candidate based on some factor. I admit to using them, but rarely, and under some form of duress. Before exploring the latest news-making culprit, let’s trace voters’ fast-changing attitudes on the broader issue of gay rights.

As I noted here years ago, there are few issues on which public opinion has changed more rapidly than gay rights. Forty years ago, in the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey (GSS), 72 percent condemned “sexual relations between two adults of the same sex” as “always wrong.” For the next 15 years that figure bounced between 67 percent and 75 percent. Then, rather suddenly, after 1988, it began a precipitous fall, declining almost 30 points over the ensuing 22 years, dropping just under a point and a half a year on average.

Marriage remained the highest hurdle. As recently as 1988, a mere 11 percent agreed that “homosexual couples should have the right to marry one another.” By 2010 (the latest GSS data available), support increased to 46 percent – an average growth rate of over a point and a half a year. Just six years after the first state began granting marriage licenses to gay couples, a plurality of Americans approved of same-sex marriage.

Contrast that with the history of support for interracial marriage. In 1948, when California’s Supreme Court struck down a law forbidding interracial marriage, 90 percent of Americas opposed it.

By 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage nationally, some 72 percent were still opposed. Opponents only became a minority 43 years after the California decision and 24 years after the Supreme Court ruling. Today, 86 percent approve.

Despite pushes from courts and legislatures, support for interracial marriage increased by about 1.2 points a year, a slower rate than acceptance of same-sex marriage.

That brings us to President Obama’s historic embrace of marriage equality and the poll question I hate. Posed about a variety of issues, in this case the offending item asked whether “President Obama’s support of same-sex marriage make[s] you more likely to vote for him, less likely to vote for him or doesn’t