Dear Marriage Supporter,

It was a very tough election for marriage. On Wednesday, the day after, Maggie Gallagher was at church, and she emailed me to let me know about what the readings at Mass that day had to say. She said she thought that the reading from Paul's letter to the Philippians seemed to be speaking very clearly to all of us who are in the fight to defend marriage:

My beloved, obedient as you have always been,
not only when I am present but all the more now when I am
absent, work out your salvation
with fear and trembling.
For God is the one who, for his good purpose,
works in you both to desire and to work.

Let's take a step back and assess what happened.

Crunching the Numbers

We narrowly lost in four deep blue states, after being badly outspent. Even though NOM contributed a record amount to help these state races—$5.5 million—our opponents were able to amass vast amounts of cash to drive their campaigns. They outspent us by $20 million, and that money helped them win narrow victories.

How close did we come? In Maine, we would have won if 18,000 voters had gone the other way. In Maryland, we lost by 94,000 votes out of 2.4 million cast. In Minnesota, about 100,000 votes out of 2.9 million cast. And in Washington, we lost by 83,000 votes out of 2.1 million ballots counted so far (final results there won't be known for days).

We always knew it would be a tough fight. These states are so liberal that they were never contested at the presidential level, except very late in Minnesota, resulting in blowout wins for Obama in each of the four states.

It's funny how the left and the media work. Can you imagine if marriage elections were held in Texas, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina and gay marriage advocates had narrowly lost those fights after being outspent by $20 million? Do you think the media and the left would suggest that homosexual marriage advocates cut and run and give up the fight because they lost in those states? Of course not! If anything, they'd be congratulating them on a great showing.

Yet some advocates on the left and in the media are saying we've lost. It's preposterous!

One of the PR spins that our opponents are pushing is that somehow these votes signal that the country has changed their views about same-sex marriage. That is preposterous as well.

Bottom Line: Marriage Still a Winning Proposition

NOM is today releasing the results of a nationwide survey conducted on Election Day of actual voters. The poll was conducted by Kellyanne Conway's highly regarded firm, 'the polling company, inc.' This latest survey shows that fully 60% of voters believe marriage is one man and one woman, which is consistent with the 57% result they found in September.

And here's another point the media should consider: despite narrowly losing, the pro-marriage position out-performed the Republican ticket by an average of 6.6 points in these four states. This confirms that had marriage been put to a national vote, our side would likely have captured at least 55% of the popular vote this past Tuesday. The GOP ticket captured 48.4% of the popular vote nationwide. Marriage outperformed the GOP ticket by an average of 6.6 points. The facts show that it is wrong to contend that preserving marriage as the union of a man and a woman is anything but a winning issue in America.

But coming back to the elections, even though we fought valiantly, none of us accept losing. I promise you we will be chewing through the data, re-evaluating what worked and what didn't, and figuring out and sharing with you how to forge new pathways to new victories.

Forging New Pathways for the Fights Ahead

It's clear that we need to forge new partnerships with so-called 'economic conservatives'—the people who contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to candidates and Super PACs to run ads about the economy. We need to show them how supporting marriage will help conservative candidates, and that it is in their own interests to ensure that marriage campaigns are well-funded.

It's also clear that we need to create structures that will allow deeper engagement within the evangelical, orthodox and other supportive religious communities, and translate the conceptual support we enjoy into creating tens of thousands of grassroots activists to help us do the hard work of walking precincts, phoning voters and organizing at the grassroots levels.

We have work to do to deepen our relationships with the minority community, who are being challenged by President Obama and the NAACP to ignore the word of God and instead cast a political vote to redefine marriage.

And we have work to do with the GOP to remind them that marriage is a winning issue and that it is a mistake for republican candidates to be quiet on their support for maintaining natural marriage.

But most of all, it's clear that we need to develop new channels of financial support. As hard as we worked and as much as we produced, it wasn't enough. We simply cannot spot our opponents a $20 million funding advantage—especially in very liberal states—and expect to pull off a miracle (although we nearly did).

As Paul spoke to me the other day, I want to thank each and every one of you who stands up for God’s truth about marriage:

But, even if I am poured out as a libation upon the sacrificial service of your faith, I rejoice and share my joy with all of you.

In the same way you also should rejoice and share your joy with me.

Those of you who are not Christians, thank you most warmly for standing up on marriage! I treasure your fellowship and your courage.

While pouring over accounts of the national election results I came, via National Review's The Corner, this striking insight from Joel Kotkin:

[President Obama] held his own in the cash race by assembling a new, competing coalition of wealthy backers, from the 'new hierarchies of technical elites' that Daniel Bell predicted in 1976 in The Coming Of Post-Industrial Society. For that group, Bell wrote, nature and human nature ceased to be central, as 'fewer now handle artifacts or things' so that 'reality is primarily the social world'—which, he warned, 'gives rise to a new Utopianism' that mistakenly treats human nature as something that can be engineered and corrected by instruction from their enlightened betters.

To them, reality is some sort of construct, but of course human nature is real. Cultural constructs by technocratic elites, like same-sex marriage, take enormous amount of energy to sustain, to defend, because they are not rooted in what is Real.

We are born male and female and called to come together in love to make and raise the next generation. That's not a construct, that's Reality.

While I am disappointed today, I am not defeated. We are fighting a true and just cause—and a popular one to boot with voters across America. We've suffered a setback, to be sure, but we will rebound stronger, smarter and more successful than ever before.