Now when NRA candidates in Virginia win in a landslide, Brady will no doubt claim it’s because of other issues.
For better or worse, guns didn’t play a prominent role in the outcomes of any of the four high-profile races yesterday — Virginia Governor, New York-23, New Jersey Governor, and New York City Mayor. By almost all accounts, the bad economy and high unemployment were the key ballot-box issues.
The thing is they are right, largely. The gun vote is only a component of McDonnell’s landslide victory, and Christie certainly isn’t our guy, but nor is he a sworn opponent to our point of view. I said the same thing about the 2008 election, and its funny to see Brady using my spin only a year later. But there’s a difference.
We can at least point to some evidence that we can affect elections to a large degree on the margins. Where is the Brady equivalent? What is the Brady margin? No single issue group can swing an election under all circumstances, but we at least have some idea what our margin is.
UPDATE: I suppose I should thank Doug, or whoever is doing the Brady Blog these days, for the link. We’ll have to see how much traffic a Brady link drives these days. Good thing I performance turned my server. I await the hordes to arrive!
And this is a great day to compare links since the Bloomberg losses post got picked up by @NRANews today, too! We can compare and contrast.
Right on target again Sebastian. The gun vote was a component of the larger win for McDonnell. McDonnell spoke to the issues that mattered most in Virginia and right now that is jobs and transportation. What is important is he did not back down when asked his views on things like background checks on private sales at gun shows (the only difference between him and Deeds on the firearms issue), and on repealing handgun rationing.
We do know however that Steve Shannon made an overt anti-gun pitch in the final two weeks in his race for Attorney General and it did not work. Once again it has been proven anti-gun people aren’t motivated to vote on that issue alone as pro-gun folks are. Shannon fell for the same reason as Deeds – he did not give people a reason to vote for him.
The argument that it’s not about guns doesn’t work as well farther down in the VA race. In Ken Cuccinelli’s election as AG gun rights figure prominently – both in the negative ads run by Dems and Cuccinelli’s advocacy for firearms rights in VA.
Well it shouldn’t be shocking that they aren’t looking at the down-ticket seats. I remember in 2005 how the spin from everyone was that Virginia was going blue! Clearly, with two Democratic governors in a row, Virginia was really headed down that path to being a blue state. The media seemed to have missed the results that showed a GOP Lt. Gov., GOP AG, etc. Flat out, every active Republican I talked to in NoVA cited Kilgore’s abysmal campaign as the reason they thought he lost. I am actually surprised that with that lesson in the bag that Deeds didn’t figure out earlier that his campaign was the problem.
I voted for Deeds in 2005. I would not have gone near him 2009. The problem wasn’t just the throwaway gun show issue, it was that everything that I saw about his campaign and heard about from my mom in Roanoke was completely different than what he did in 2005. I saw a commercial on Monday night that actually talked about him – and I wondered just where that version of Creigh had been this year.
I really hope that the lesson Democrats take out of this isn’t to run farther left and more anti-gun. If the Deeds of 2009 was the Deeds of 2005, this wouldn’t have been a problem. In fact, it might have been another squeaky tight race. We can enjoy the fact that it wasn’t because of the message it sends to Obama, but I think ultimately Virginia voters (specifically gun owners) lose by having lost the old Creigh Deeds.
Christie won *despite* an abysmal campaign where his opposition attempted to tie him to Bush and the NRAat every opportunity. Every Corzine ad I saw mentioned that Christie was opposed to the .50 cal ban. Apparenlty true based on factcheck.org; who has this gem “Christie said at a February press conference: “I think, you know, from my looking at it across the country, you know, we have very, very good, tough gun laws in this country, in this state, and I don’t know that we need any more.”
Which statement, incidentally, is an astounding repudiation of gun control for an NJ politician. We’ll see how he lives up to it.
As far as Virginia is concerned, I’d love to see a crackdown on gun crime (using the “good” gun laws of course), to keep the MSM and other idiots distracted while the new powers-that-be quietly work to remove all the “bad” gun laws.
In the meantime, though, I’m just a *very* happy camper that three of the four people I voted for won.
I did not realize that they link to gun blogs from their blogs.
Regardless of the margin, it is better guns are not an issue than anti-gun sentiment running high.
They’ve linked to me a few times. Once because I think they were horrified that I was poking Mike V. as to why he and his merry band haven’t started a revolution yet if our government is really so bad.
I don’t think the Brady’s realize those guys are clowns. I think they might actually believe they are dangerous.