Politics – Page 181 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Brady Campaign: Please Don’t Believe the NRA Democrats, Pretty Please!

It looks like Paulie is begging Democrats to ignore history, the advice of their past (successful) leaders, and scholarly research. In his post yesterday, he skirts around the truth in a plea begging Democrats not to go running into the arms of the NRA.

This myth that promoting and passing strict gun laws can be political suicide has its roots in the 1994 elections, when Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress. Bill Clinton was president and earlier in his term he supported and signed the laws restricting the sale of assault weapons and the Brady bill requiring that federally licensed dealers conduct background checks. In his 2004 autobiography he wrote, â€œThe NRA â€¦could rightly claim to have made Gingrich the House speaker.â€

But as Clinton also pointed out, there were a lot of other reasons for the game-changing defeats. The party in control almost always loses seats in off-year elections. It was to be no different in 1994.

Let’s look at the mid-term elections prior to 1994 to see if we can see just how true that is:

1982	1986	1990	1994
26 seats	5 seats	8 seats	54 seats

At no point in my lifetime was there anything close to the election of 1994. You can’t compare losing 5 or 8 seats to losing 54 seats. You can’t even begin to compare 26 seats – the previous record of my lifetime. So, yes, Paul is telling the truth. But, he’s hiding the fact that you’re talking about a handful of people losing their seats to more than 10% of the House changing hands. To paraphrase Joe Biden, that’s a big freakin’ deal. Paul can try to downplay it all he wants, but he can’t escape those pesky contextual facts.

Even beyond the numbers game, there is a little bit of truth in what Paul argues – NRA’s support can’t make or break every race in every election. If leaders piss off grassroots members of 20 other interest groups, it’s going to be tough for the members of one single group to outnumber the members of so many others. Not to mention, now that Democrats have done all they can to piss off not only Republicans, but a majority of independents, well, there’s only so much we can do as one single group.

However, the power of the NRA is at the individual district level. An Independence Institute study found that for every 10,000 NRA members, an endorsement will add about 3% to a candidate’s total. I think our own congressional race is a great example.

When the two current candidates ran against each other in 2006, the difference was a mere 1,518 votes across the entire district. Most of the district is made up of Bucks County, so I’m looking at their license to carry information to give estimates on just how many votes gun owners can provide. In 2006, nearly 4,500 people of voting age got a carry license in Bucks County. Add in the “current” licenses of people at the time, and you’re talking about 17,194 potential votes in the district. There’s no way to figure it up for the portion of Philadelphia included in the congressional district, but that portion of the city has a large number of firefighters and police officers who are frequently pro-gun. (Believe me, we’ve had lots of cops calling to find out who is endorsed by NRA this year.) Let’s safely say 20,000 potential voters.

Every single one of those votes matters, and NRA has had an active voter registration drive going the last few years. If we can pull a couple of thousand more votes out of those numbers, then the endorsement & promotion will make a difference.

As mighty as the NRA is perceived to be by overly cautious politicians and their advisors, thanks to the courage of leaders, scores of victims, and supporters of sensible gun laws, the gun lobby doesnâ€™t make much of a difference on who wins and loses elections.

The Brady Campaign can’t point to a study of the impact of their endorsements in elections. They don’t have voters walking up to candidates with a voter guide in hand saying that the group’s support guided their votes. They can’t actually point to any races where their support did make a difference. In a year like this, NRA’s endorsement is likely to help boost the numbers by just enough to put some challengers over the top and possibly protect some incumbents.

Again, Paul is correct in that NRA doesn’t exactly get to handpick all of Congress. But, what they can measurably do is impact enough races that politicians clamor to us in order to pick up our votes in hopes that their race is one to benefit. So, once again, context matters.

Laying the Ground Work

The Brady Campaign is pretty clearly laying the ground work for their push to get the Democrats to abandon the NRA post-election, by saying the 1994 elections were never really about guns, and that the Democrats who do not take NRA money (and who are also, conveniently, in safe, heavily lefty Democratic urban districts) are going to fare better than those who do.

The real lesson for the Democrats is that you can’t expect to win your majority back with pro-gun Blue Dog Democrats, then twist their arms to vote for Pelosi and Obama’s radical agenda, and then expect the gun vote to save you. The gun vote is powerful, but not that powerful. Being pro-gun is still going to win those candidates more than it will cost them, and in some of those districts it’s necessary to get elected at all.

Social Issues in a Crumbling Economy

If you want to appear out-of-touch with voters, the fastest way to do that is to send the kind of flyer I received from Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy yesterday.

Background: According to the lists they have, I’m a Republican woman and have only been registered in Pennsylvania as a Republican. (This is unusual for me, as I haven’t been formally affiliated with either party since I was a teenager and initially registered in Oklahoma.) On paper, I’m dedicated enough to have voted in the Republican primary, and the last time I voted in a general, the GOP swept all of the county races. In other words, there’s nothing about my Pennsylvania voting history that indicates I’m open to their messages on either fiscal or social issues.

Every Democrat running in this state has been hammering on the economy. They know it’s what people want to hear. Yet, Murphy decided to send me a mailer that has women’s faces plastered on one side telling me that Mike Fitzpatrick will ban abortion. The other side says, “We’ve been here before.”

My response to Sebastian when I showed him the mailer this morning: “No, I’ve never been there before. I’m a Republican woman who is iffy on the abortion issue at best, and I’ve never been sitting on a dirty street with my head between my knees in a trashy looking dress.” There is literally nothing on the flyer that I can identify with – women having sex on the street, women getting abortions left and right, the fact that I know the Supremes are not going to change Roe, and there’s no serious threat to abortion in the political world right now.

Sebastian then pointed out that while there’s not a huge pro-life movement here in our district, the chances are extremely high that a woman who has registered with the Republican Party and votes in their primaries is actually an abortion opponent. He’s right about that, especially given the highly Catholic population around here. While many might overlook Murphy’s votes to fund abortions with their money, having his pro-abortion stance thrown in their face will almost certainly turn them off.

We can’t find one thing about this flyer that is remotely relevant to the issues that local voters are talking about this year. There’s nothing that’s on message to my voter file at all. I can’t even fathom what made him do this.

What Do You Do if You’re Dan Onorato?

As I was running errands yesterday, I couldn’t help but notice a very lonely Dan Onorato for Governor sign sitting in a median – no owner, no signs of friends posted immediately around it. And I got to thinking, what should a candidate like Dan Onorato do?

Last month, the County Executive had a whooping $3.3 million in the bank. When you consider we have one of the most expensive media markets in the country, and the rest of the state is spread out among a bunch of different markets, that doesn’t go terribly far in buying television advertising when you factor in all the other normal expenses in a campaign – including the “street money” to buy votes in Philly.

His opponent, Attorney General Tom Corbett, reported $7.7 million on hand. To top that off, in every single poll, he’s trouncing Onorato from 7-15 points.

So, Onorato clearly doesn’t have state recognition or voter approval, even after running a general campaign since he won a contested primary in March that gave him lots of coverage over Corbett and his lack of a serious primary. He doesn’t have enough enthusiasm to rally the base to open their wallets. Unless we end up with a live boy/dead girl scenario, this race is in the bag.

With that in mind, do you spend the money in the areas where you need high Democratic turnout to have any shot of winning? Or, do you effectively give up on the Governor’s mansion and spend in areas where you are polling poorly in an attempt to simply build name recognition for a future run for some other statewide office? What would you suggest for Onorato?

Crying Wolf Sexism

A Democratic candidate in a solidly Republican district in Virginia has had older photos of her, uh, boyfriend’s Halloween costume in her mouth. And his Halloween costume just happened to be a bright red sex toy and a leash.

Unfortunately, she’s screaming sexism. She’s convinced the media would never cover these photographs at all if she only had a penis. I would do quite a rant about why it’s not sexist to cover a political scandal, but I think the folks at Gawker said it best:

She continues: “I’m angry at the way women in this country are unfairly treated in this regard when they step up and run for office.” Because if a man sucked a rubber dick attached to the nose of another man, we would never publish that picture.

That link is also where you can find the pictures that include her posing in her revealed thigh highs, lace skirt, and drink in hand.

For the record, I realize that most reasonable people are going to have embarrassing skeletons in the closet. With the rise of digital photography and the ease of taking and storing pictures on devices that slide into your pocket, more of these types of photos will naturally be taken than they were before. These pictures don’t disqualify her for the office. They were apparently shortly after she graduated college, so it’s not surprising to see these kinds of antics among most people that age.

What I think makes her unqualified for my vote (if I had one there) is her screaming sexism where none exists. The fact is that these photos would be plastered around if she was a man. Oh, and her C rating from NRA doesn’t help her case to voters, either.

NRA-PVF Starting to Spend Money

Even the New York Times is saying a favorable word this year. The bill is going to be fifteen to twenty million this election cycle. One of the ads they are running is against Joe Sestak:

In a year that most people aren’t too concerned about guns, this ad doesn’t give it more than a passing mention. The messaging works out in Pennsylvania because we have pro-gun conservative Republicans running against anti-gun leafy Democrats, in both our major state-wide races. Dems here haven’t gotten the message that being anti-gun is uncool yet.

The great challenge this year is that everyone is worried about big government, deficits, spending, and the economy. A message that Joe Sestak is a wild-eyed gun grabber isn’t going to carry as much water as saying he’s an out of touch big government politician, who, by the way, doesn’t care much for your Second Amendment rights.

Duty to Retreat

The York Daily Record correctly points out that this case has nothing to do with castle doctrine. The guy basically fired a shot into the air, blocked the thief from leaving with another vehicle, and held him at gun point until police arrived. He has not been (and should not be) charged.

This falls pretty squarely under prosecutorialÂ discretion, probably significantly bolstered by the fact that the prosecution is well aware they will have a hard time finding a jury that’s going to convict this guy. In many ways, the civil immunity is the real change Castle Doctrine brings, despite the fact that it also revises the self-defense law. It’s highly unlikely that anywhere in Pennsylvania you’ll be convicted of shooting someone who has broken into your home, no matter what the law may technically say. Dave Hardy recently told of a similar situation in Arizona:

Here in AZ, with real juries, the results are quite different. A prosecutor once told me that he’d urged the County Attorney to stop prosecuting homeowners who shot burglars in the back. They’d just lost three of those cases in a row. Whatever the statute law might be, jurors saw one fewer burglar as a good thing and would not convict a fellow homeowner for having done a good thing.

Trial by jury is one of the most important legal institutions we inherited from English Law. It doesn’t really matter what the Arizona Revised Statutes or the Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes say, if you can’t find a jury that will convict under those circumstances, the practice is, for all practical purposes, legal. Trial by jury is one of the great checks the people have on their government. Self-defense law is probably one of the areas the people differ most greatly from the officials who serve them. Castle Doctrine doesn’t do much more than bring statutory law into line with what most people think it already is, or should be. It’s not surprising, then, that the law has broad, bi-partisan support. Yet the politicians still don’t really want to vote on it, as the current debacle in the Pennsylvania Senate is showing us.

Philly Area Not Doing so Well

I’m not surprised we’ve lost so many jobs, considering what an awful place Pennsylvania is to do business. We have among the highest corporate tax rates in the country, and our government is increasingly looking for ways to make it even worse. If I were going to start a business, I’d go to an up and coming market. This area has been my home all my life, but it has no future as long as the people keep sending politicians to Harrisburg that make anti-business policy choices, and vote for bloated an expensive government. And this is just the ‘burbs I’m talking about. The City of Philadelphia is a basket case in its own right, and beginning to rival such stellar cities as Detroit and Baltimore in sheer craptitude.

The only thing we have going for us is housing prices haven’t taken as bad a beating as other markets, because we never bubbled very much since even in good times no one wants to live here.

Final Push for Castle Doctrine

It’s stuck in the Senate. Click here to see the NRA alert and who to call. We also need to reiterate to State Senators that we expect a clean bill. Efforts are underway to amend the bill. We have to do this now, or it’s dead for this session, and we have to go through this all again.

Just Like “Lost and Stolen”

Upper Moreland Township, in suburban Philadelphia, wants to fine citizens who don’t lock their cars. Funny, I kind of thought the punishment for that was built-in.