NRA Members Vote – or Do They?

I’m doing this guest post because I know Sebastian is busy this morning, and he asked me to post.  Last spring, I did a couple of posts on my old blog about random facts on NRA voting.  It was timed to the Annual Meeting since that’s where such announcements are made.  However, I think these random facts and figures are far more relevant now than in May after all the ballots are cast.  In light of that, I’ve now made pretty charts that, in some cases, make it easier to visualize the trends – or lack thereof.

For a little bit of background on this data, the 2006-2007 sources are the annual meeting reports from the previous year that I managed to hold onto after recent NRA meetings.  The 2008 data was scribbled very quickly during the meeting in Louisville.

As you can see, during the last few years, voting member populations have remained quite stable.  Even though we know through anecdotal evidence that NRA membership was rising as the threat of a Democratic presidency rose, the number of voting members didn’t change substantially.  Based on this very limited data, we can reasonably assume that the biggest changes NRA sees in its membership are the folks who join for a year or two and then likely forget to renew or refuse to renew because their free hat didn’t arrive fast enough.  If you stay long enough to become a voting member, you’ll likely stay active for a long time.

When working with such large numbers, it’s hard to see in the charts what the trends are  in terms of voting.  But by doing the math and plugging the percentage of ballots cast into a chart, we can get a better idea.  I have no idea if the overall percentage of voting members is really on the rise.  By only looking at three years of data, it’s impossible to see a trend.  In 2006, there were few “celebrity” candidates, which may have lead to a depressed turnout.  But, 2007’s biggest “celebrity” name was Ollie North, and 2008 was Tom Selleck.  I would expect that Tom Selleck would generally be able to inspire more folks to return their ballots than Ollie.

While we wait for Sebastian to finish up his Board Member interviews, tomorrow I’ll do a post on how many people screw up their ballots – and the many bizarre ways they find to get it so very wrong.