Poll: A Plurality of Republicans Now Want to Legalize Marijuana
The margin is narrow but the trend is clear.
We just passed another milestone in America's gradual rejection of the war on marijuana: For the first time, a YouGov poll shows a plurality of Republicans thinking pot should be legal. The survey, conducted earlier this month, has 45 percent of the party favoring legalization and 42 percent opposed to it. That's not exactly an enormous lead, especially in light of the 4.5 percent margin of error. But the trend is pretty clear, and the shift has been rather rapid:
As I was saying last week, the best way to tell how far a social transformation has gone is to keep an eye on the ideas that conservatives accept, not the ideas that radicals propose. Legal pot is now widely endorsed among the GOP rank and file. Perhaps one day soon it will be embraced even by the nation's most retrograde group: the politicians.