The Advocate and Sirius OutQ release election "OutQuotient"

The Advocate magazine and Sirius OutQ radio on Wednesday released their "OutQuotient" for the 2004 general election. The quotient is a weighted composite index designed to offer an overall snapshot--on a 0-100 scale--of the gay population's success on election night. With 99% of the races called, the Advocate/OutQ OutQuotient stood at 51. Sirius OutQ and The Advocate identified dozens of races of interest to gay people, involving gay, pro-gay, or antigay candidates and ballot measures. A panel of experts rated those races on a 1-10 scale for the importance of a victory for gays. The weighted races were then placed on a 0-100 scale, where 0 was "all losses, no wins" and 100 meant gay interests had a victory in each and every race. The quotient is the total weight of all races divided into the weight of races where the gay community "won." The result was then multiplied by 100. In order to create some frame of reference for the OutQuotient number, the pundit panel also was asked to rate each race on a 1-5 scale according to the likelihood of a gay community win. Those ratings were then used to create two ranges within the total 0-100 range: The "certain" range, defining the minimum and maximum OutQuotient realistically possible; and the "likely" range, representing our experts' best guess where the number would end up at the end of the night. Thus, an OutQuotient below the "likely" range--once all races are called--could be described as "worse than we expected," and a number near the top of the "certain" range could be described as "incredibly well."