America’s voters don’t care for gun control. That much is obvious even to the Democrats’ presidential candidate, Kamala Harris.
Harris previously campaigned for radical gun control laws and, as Vice President, oversees the “White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention,” which uses the power and funding of the federal government to further an anti-gun agenda. Now, in an attempt to gain political traction and distance herself from that toxic record, Harris has reinvented herself as a “gun owner” and “supporter” of the Second Amendment. (Whatever credibility that stance generated, though, likely evaporated after Harris was questioned about it during an online rally with Oprah Winfrey. A giggling Harris could not restrain her hilarity when saying that if “someone breaks into my house they are getting shot,” followed by the even more inept, “[p]robably should not have said that, but my staff will deal with that later.”).
A Gallup poll at the end of September shows that the five most important voting issues for Democrat/Democrat-leaning voters are “democracy in the U.S., the types of Supreme Court justices the candidates would appoint, abortion, healthcare and education. (Immigration, terrorism and national security, crime, and taxes were Republican/Republican leaning voters’ top five.)
As was the case in 2020, this means anti-gun advocates struggle to make gun control an appealing issue for voters.
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety group has hit upon the opportunistic strategy of tapping into the unrelated, but much more resonant for the left, issue of abortion. A 2022 press release from Everytown (Tying Together Guns and Abortion as a Winning Campaign Message) explains that, “[c]ombining these two issues is a highly effective messaging strategy, and results in a five to seven point increase of support for candidates who are on the side of gun safety,” as what apparently links these issues is “safety and security” of families and communities, and that they “both motivate the Democratic base.”
Bloomberg’s Everytown is running with the same strategy in this election. In August, the political arm of Everytown, the Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund, announced it had teamed up with the Planned Parenthood Action Fund to push for term limits for U.S. Supreme Court justices (“standing up for the rights and safety of all Americans”) and to fund a digital ad campaign to mobilize key constituencies over abortion rights. Everytown’s Action Fund has separately funded multi-million dollar media campaigns based on candidates’ stances on abortion (here and here).
One such political advertisement paid for by the Everytown for Gun Safety Victory Fund targets Republican Congressman Marc Molinaro (NY-19), portraying him as the potential “deciding vote for a total abortion ban with no exceptions,” and winding up with “we can’t let [him] take away our rights.”
Molinaro is in a tight race with challenger Josh Riley, a Democrat, with abortion and immigration as the two dominant issues. Although Molinaro is against an abortion ban, Riley is seeking to convince voters that Molinaro is an extremist on abortion, and his campaign has targeted Molinaro on the issue in an effort to boost voter turnout.
Strangely, although Riley is endorsed as a gun control candidate by no less than Everytown, Giffords, and the Brady Campaign, the Everytown for Gun Safety Victory Fund ad makes no mention of his credentials on that issue.
If, as Everytown maintains, gun control is a compelling election issue that energizes the Democratic base, why has the group shifted its brand away from its founding agenda? Endorsing a “gun safety champion” like Riley, only to focus exclusively on his position on some unconnected issue, seems very much like a tacit admission that “vote for gun control” is a ballot box loser. After all, if the issue is a powerful one, it should be compelling enough to stand alone, without being packaged with something quite different. Everytown’s messaging, couched as it is in the importance of safety and security and preserving “our rights,” is also distinctly at odds with its hostility to gun rights, self-defense and the Second Amendment.
Even with Bloomberg’s billions and what it claims is widespread popular support for gun control, to influence voters Everytown finds it necessary to portray itself as the defender of rights and align itself with policy issues that have absolutely nothing to do with firearms. Like Kamala Harris – a gun owner who doesn’t like guns or the Second Amendment – it seems that Everytown can only succeed by presenting itself as other than what it really is.
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