This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 26, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When you examine vote totals for gay marriage in Maryland, you see that the initiative carried two big

GOP counties when you examine the data more closely the story becomes

even more troubling for anti-gay Republicans. Walter Olson, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, comments.

What do we know now about Maryland Question 6?

This was the gay marriage amendment and was came to victory well to start with what

was the margin on question six in Maryland the gay marriage amendment

Maryland voters approved question six by margin of 52 to 48 percent.

And it was close in large part because the question ran into well-reported resistance in Prince George's County and other block areas of Maryland.

The final exit polls indicated that something like 46% of block voters had gone for question

six and this is important in Maryland because it's among the most heavily minority of states in the Union, 28% of the electorate.

And that meant that it was bound to be close.

What people were not always expecting was that question six would do as well as it did among Republican

areas.

And on election night, there was a good bit of surprise, even astonishment, when the two biggest Republican counties in

Maryland Frederick and Anna Rundle which went for Romney as they usually go for Republicans

in a close race also both went for question six.

We don't want to read too much into these results but you looked at essentially precinct

level data and found some things that were pretty surprising.

Yeah, I dug into the precinct level detail,

knowing that there had to be some story in here,

...