The Brady Campaign has started a system of organizing phone banks from across the country to get people out to vote in the Washington ballot initiative fight.
This is the kind of election work that so very few of our people are willing to do. It is unfortunate because, as annoying as those phone calls can be, the personal calls are among the best way to encourage someone to get out to vote and to find out if someone already has voted or plans to vote.*
This is the period before an election where the grassroots becomes vital. If you’re a Washington gun owner and you want to stand any chance of beating the cash Bloomberg, Gates, and Ballmer are throwing obscene amounts of money at this gun control initiative, you have to be working hard to inspire other gun owners to show up and vote your way.
In 1976, Massachusetts gun owners defeated a ballot initiative through tough grassroots work. Gun owners bothered to show up (about 18,000 of them) to county-wide meetings. Of those, about 2,000 became active volunteers. They spent Election Day standing outside of polls with literature and signs. They spoke out in their communities. These last few days are the days to pull votes away with a campaign to inform the people who only pay attention to the ballot in the last couple of weeks.
I know when I posted about this type of grassroots work before, people complained that they weren’t involved because they didn’t see anything personally. Well, go look for it. NRA’s involvement (and I know there’s more on the ground, too) has been highlighted on a Facebook page with local events and they put 2 full-time staffers on the ground who have been listed on their elections-related page for months. This is on top of the volunteer network that has already been in place there. The resources are there, now it’s time for local gun owners to use them if they want to stand any chance at all.
*Here’s a tip: Let a live caller know that you’ve a) already made up your mind for issues or a candidate, or b) already voted (if early voting is allowed), and you’ll end up dropped from most future call lists for that election. Phone calls are pretty much only get out the vote or know who plans to get out and vote activities. Letting either candidate know you’ve made up your mind or already cast a ballot means they don’t want to waste time on you anymore.
How does this phone bank thing work? What kind of monitoring will the Brady’s have in place?
What I mean is, would it be possible to have pro-gun volunteers calling out and sending a pro-gun message on the Brady’s dime?
Just an honest question. ;)
I was wondering the same thing……
All times, curiously, are EST. This, even though Washington is on Pacific time, and the first three dates occur during DST. It’s awfully nice of Brady to have their calls all wrapped up by 5PM local.
As the article regarding the MA handgun ban states:
In other words, the antis are hoping for a win on I-594 to lend credence to their ridiculous “everyone wants universal background checks” claim and to build momentum for taking it elsewhere across the US.
Gun owners here in PA should be watching the I-594 situation in WA closely at a minimum, and if feeling so inclined helping out in any way possible. I threw 25 bucks at the NRA-ILA myself, knowing they do have a ground game in WA and are currently campaigning against Bloomberg’s proxies in the senate. Nobody is saying you need to fly to the Evergreen State and knock on doors, but there are ways to help.
I had the same thoughts as Archer when I received that same email from the Brady Campaign.
Even if you didn’t want to make calls, you could prevent anti-gun calls if you signed up, were assigned a list of numbers, and just didn’t call them. I’ll leave it up to the reader if they would want to report the calls as being made. That could be 25-50 Washington voters not contacted by the anti’s.
I’m not sure how well this would go over, but it would be interesting to call those numbers anyway, and encourage them to go vote against I-594. Or to softly discourage them not to vote. (Imply that I-594 is a complete shoo-in, and so your vote isn’t needed…)
Or just have a nice chat with them about nothing in particular…
Such under-handed tactics probably aren’t ideal, and they may even backfire…but if John Richardson is getting these emails, it makes me wonder how many other pro-gun people are getting them as well…which makes me sit back, and think about how lucky the NRA is, to have dues-paying members, so you could be pretty sure that they are dedicated to the NRA’s cause, as opposed to the Brady Campaign, who has to count every person they send emails to as “members”…some of which are a bit less dedicated to their cause…
Come to think of it, how fun would it be to call up and say “Hello, I’m calling on behalf of the Brady Campaign, in partnership with the National Rifle Association. Because guns are so deadly, we need good, common-sense laws to help secure our safety; because ballot initiative I-594 is such a deeply flawed law, however, we need to vote NO!”? (Or something to that effect…)
This Initiative needs to be soundly defeated. Not just because of the burden it will place on Washington Gun Owners but because of what it represents.
A defeat here will signal the end of gun control. If they can’t win in a solid blue state after spending millions of dollars trying to buy the election then they can’t win anywhere.
On the other hand if they do win, they will use it as a stepping stone to push their way into other states, some perhaps less blue than WA.
Of course it’s a complete coincidence that the Seattle Times is publishing a big investigative reporting piece on lead poisoning at ranges just before the election.