Make it So! Elect Debbie Halvorson

Bloomberg has completely thrown down in the special election race in Illinois with his million dollar investment to defeat Debbie Halvorson. It’s incumbent on every gun owner in Illinois to make sure it’s a bad one. Getting Halvorson ahead of the pack, and helping out her campaign, if it leads to victory on election day, would send a huge message to the rest of the country about how good Bloomberg’s money is when put against our grassroots. I know I haven’t been too keen on the Democratic Party lately, but this is an overwhelmingly Democratic district, and Halvorson is enough of a threat that Bloomberg thought it was worth a million dollars, and this is shaping up to be a strategic race.

16 thoughts on “Make it So! Elect Debbie Halvorson”

    1. This is a D+32 district previously represented by Jesse Jackson Jr. She’s willing to vote against bans. She’s an improvement, and sometimes an improvement is the best you can ask for.

  1. It would be huge if the good people of Illinois could prevent Bloomy from doing to them what he did to us in PA with the Attorney General’s race.

  2. She changed her platform from NRA A rated to that to hope to win. I’d rather we have her in there than the guy she’s replacing who was rabidly anti-gun but yet was arrested at a TSA checkpoint for trying to board a plane with a handgun.

    She needs to win despite Bloomberg’s money.

    I tossed her $100.

    -Gene

    1. If we replaced all the Jackson Jrs, Feinsteins, Pelosis, and Lautenbergs of the world with people that held Debbie Halverson’s positions on guns, we’d be way ahead of the game from where we are now. If she were running in my district, my opinion of her candidacy would be very different, but she’s not running in my district, she’s running in Jesse Jackson Jr’s.

      Bloomberg didn’t earn billions of dollars by being a moron. If he’s dumping a million into this race he’s doing it for a reason.

  3. Everything u are saying may be true, she most likely is the best we could hope for in this district, but I cannot bring myself to lift a finger to help a democrat. I know I should not be so stubborn, but what can u do?

    1. Well, I guess you can sit down and be happy to take whatever Michael Bloomberg says is best for you – whether that’s gun bans, salt, soda, or no more take-out. That’s what he wants. He wants gun owners to sit out, sit back, and shut up. He wants to make sure that our choices are limited so that we don’t have any more pro-gun Democrats to support, and he’d like to make it so that we don’t have pro-gun Republicans to count on anymore.

      At some point, you have to acknowledge political reality. This is not a seat Republicans can win or hold on to. This is a seat that will even be tough for Halvorson to hold on to for the long term if she wins. However, you have the option of making sure that while the worst of the worst legislation is being debated, there’s someone in the seat who won’t actively run around trying to drive up support for gun bans.

      1. I actually am not blind to political realities, I am fully aware there is no chance a republican can win this seat. My point is, it does not matter which democrat wins, they will all vote the same. I don’t care one whit what she says, Casey was a big “pro-gun dem” also was he not? Now, not so much. I guess he evolved huh? Same thing here. Matters not at all what she says, she is a democrat and they all come home eventually. Her district is one of the most liberal in the country. No way she can long oppose an AWB.

  4. I keep flashing back to how everyone including the NRA was trying to sell Pennsylvanians on Bob Casey, Jr. back in 2002, in the Democratic primary, as a supposed better option for governor than Ed Rendell. I knew it was a bunch of bullshit at the time.

    Rendell won, and its impossible to know what would have happened had Casey gotten the seat. But, we largely stood off Rendell during his tenure, and now pro-gun Casey has turned on us, since it became politically expedient to do so, in his opinion; so I have to question if we would have been the slightest bit better off with Casey as governor than we were with Rendell. And yet even John Lott was going all ga-ga over Casey, at the time.

    1. Casey had never been put to the test on anything, so you could only go on what he said. Rendell had an existing record on guns.

      It possible if Casey had won he would have governed as a pro-gun governor. Very few lawmakers take their position on guns based on any real conviction. They are doing it out of self-interest, and obviously right now Bob Casey Jr. thinks his self-interest lies in supporting gun control.

      It’s possible Halvorson could turn on us, and she’s certainly not perfect on RKBA issues. But I would point out that a) we deny Bloomberg the claim that he can use his money to decide primary elections and punish pro-gun Dems, and b) if she does manage to be a consistent moderate on the gun issue, it then is an improvement. If she’s full of shit and turns on us, we’re no worse off.

      1. At the time I wrote in part:

        “Little that Casey did during his campaign helped to assuage suspicions regarding his sincerity about gun rights. From the very first, he demonstrated a desire to stand a bit distant from many gun rights groups, except for those he thought he absolutely had to accommodate, or those that he thought would serve his purposes while asking no hard or non-negotiable questions.”

        In short, Casey was playing way too coy, to be believed — unless you really wanted to believe. Does that apply to Halvorson? I know too little about her to judge.

  5. She’s white. There’s no way she’ll win in that district.
    The only reason to put up a fight is a spoiling action, forcing the antis to commit more resources than they planned–resources that otherwise would be held in reserve to exploit the inevitable missteps people on our side will make.

    Ok, maybe I just wish we had that level of strategic thinking…

    1. 3 facts from someone in the Chicago area.

      1. The black/white split in that district is about 53/47. Halvorson is the strongest white candidate.

      2. If Bloomberg is against her, we should kiss her feet.

      3. If Halvorson wins, it will create chaos in the South Side Democrat Machine. This is a very good thing.

  6. To the “does it really matter which Dem wins” the answer from 2/3 Dem California is hell yes. You can’t imagine how bad our laws would be if we didn’t have pro-gun and squishy pro-gun Dems. It’s the only reason I don’t advocate wholesale departure as Governor Brown (who is squishy pro-gun – vetoed handgun ammo shipping ban, vetoed lost and stolen reporting, vetoed LEO non roster handgun sales bans) will not be overridden by said 2/3rds.

    The right Dems matter a whole lot when you can only pick between Dems.

    -Gene

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