Joe Huffman has a great find, namely the number of Brady Campaign members, and how many have recently donated. Short answer is, it doesn’t look good for them. But go over and have a look.
Most groups don’t want their membership numbers to be public. NRA keeps the exact figure a not so closely guarded secret, but my understanding is NRA is currently running a good bit higher than 4 million members, but I guess not quite enough to claim 5 yet. Still, that’s orders of magnitude more than the Bradys claim. To compare to NRA, I would only look at the number of Brady donors who have given in the past twelve months.
UPDATE: I should also point out that it’s interesting Brady is selling their list. NRA does not sell its membership list. It’s one of the reasons we know Frank Luntz poll claiming to be polling NRA members is completely bogus. There’s no way for the pollster to know.
Its possible Luntz called random people and asked if they were NRA members. But a self limiting group like that – on a politically heated topic, raises all sorts of problems regarding accuracy.
Only 50,500 members or so? Perhaps it’s time that 100,000 pro-gun members joined the organization, and push the organization to a new direction…
How much would someone have to donate to become a voting member? :evil-grin:
Guess I need to buy my kids NRA memberships…
You could always buy them life memberships – they are 45% cheaper than the adult life memberships. They even have easy pay life – and the kids get their own magazine that’s geared for them. (I bet that makes some Brady staffers weep at night.)
“How much would someone have to donate to become a voting member?”
That’s an interesting question. Do Brady members have any say in how the organization is run, or is it purely top-down?
Notice that’s not 50,000 current members–that’s their all-time list, if I understand it right.
Luntz may very well have called people and asked whether they were NRA members. The flaw in that plan would be that it’s well established that there are millions of gun owners who “assume” that they’re NRA members and will claim NRA membership if asked, but are not members. That might seem like a distinction without a difference; after all, if they favor some gun ban and they’re gun owners, maybe that’s still news, right? But it means that they’re not part of any NRA member discussions of that issue; it’s very unlikely that these “shadow members” even get the NRA magazines, so they don’t even read about the NRA position and have probably never heard the reasoning for the NRA’s opposition to the bill they’re being asked about.