From Politico: “Dems urged to retool their guns message.” Basically Gabby Giffords is nervous that Hillary keeps talking about “taking on the NRA.” Gifford’s focus groups studies are revealing that people have a pretty favorable view of the NRA, and she would prefer Hillary to use the term “gun lobby,” because that’s totally less offensive to gun owners.
Actually, I think there’s a lot of good advice in this article, and I actually hope no one on their side listens. On a positive note:
ARS also developed specific messages to turn out parts of the original Obama coalition of blacks, Hispanics, women and millennials. The latter might actually be the most difficult to persuade. ARS’ pollsters found that millennials’ views on guns track more with the party ID than their age, and other studies have found that younger voters are especially open to gun rights, seeing them in the same vein of personal liberty as gay rights.
But as I’ve said before, it doesn’t matter if they won’t vote on it. What we corporate gun lobby folks need is more single issue or near single issue voters.
“What we corporate gun lobby folks need is more single issue or near single issue voters.”
Generationally speaking, our problem is that we allowed the gun rights movement to be co-opted by and identified with social conservatives, most of whom did not really regard it as a high priority, or a priority at all, but found it a useful decoy issue for electing social conservative candidates who only needed to learn a couple hundred words of the rap to win us over as voters. But now we have a generation coming of age what has a libertarian mentality (in the sense that “libertarian” meant 30+ years ago) and they find most of the social conservatives’ authoritarian positions anathema to their values. You can claim to be “single issue,” and mean it, but when you share only one issue with a political faction it becomes increasingly difficult to vote that way.
Well said
A lot of the swing States are very gun friendly places. I don’t think the Democratic Party line of hysterical gun control is going to play very well in those places.
Here in suburban southeast Pennsylvania I have never detected a candidate gaining any votes from supporting gun control. Democratic candidates have won while including gun control in a mix of issues, but I have never seen anyone win who tried to build a campaign on gun control as their primary/only issue. Those candidates usually fail miserably.
I have even seen that to be true in urban (in every sense of that word) Philadelphia, where a popular (in his district) state representative ran for mayor in the Democratic primary, building his campaign almost completely on demanding strong gun control, and came in a distant last in a multi-candidate field. To date, Democratic voters may tolerate gun control well, but they show no signs of being highly motivated by it.
Perhaps that could be phrased differently, since Gabby Giffords has trouble stringing more than a few words together, and probably doesn’t do a lot of strategizing. I doubt she could even vacuum the rugs before their strategy sessions. Why nobody calls them on this, I do not know.
Maybe Granny Mao could have Kim Jong Un’s tailor make her a blaze orange pantsuit, and she could pretend to go hunting? I don’t see that happening. Hillary is a dyed-in-the-wool anti-gunner, but a none too bright one. Her “strategy”, if you can call it that, is “get drunk and take on the NRA”. Her recklessness will be her undoing. Just don’t be in range of her throwing arm on the day after the election.